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With an increasing demand to reduce the product development time cycle from concept-to-vehicle, weight saving effort and less prototype initiative, CAE evaluation technique in the vehicle durability development must allow the computer simulation to reproduce the actual driving condition over a proving ground. This paper describes the case study to predict the durability performance of full vehicle using vehicle FE parts in ADAMS model. The objective is to carry out full vehicle simulation in actual road load condition using reduced full vehicle FE model, condensed with the ADAMS model. The measured acceleration is applied to the vehicle FE model and dynamic loads converted to equivalent static loads. The FE model solved in MSC.Nastran® with number of static load subcases converted from the measured proving ground road data. It also verifies the validity of the evaluation methodologies by simulation-to-experiment comparisons.

In the current scenario, the major thrust is to simulate the customer usage pattern and lab test using virtual simulation methods. Going ahead, prime importance will be to reduce the number of soft tool prototype for all tests which can be predicted in CAE. Automotive door slam test is significantly complex in terms of prediction through simulation. Current work focuses on simulating the slam event and deriving load histories at different mounting locations through dynamic analysis using LSDyna. These extracted load histories are applied to trimmed door Nastran model and modal transient analysis is performed to find the transient stress history. This approach has a significant advantage of less computation time and stress-convergence with Nastran for performing multiple design iterations compared to LSDyna. Good failure correlation is achieved with the test using this approach. Using these load histories, design improvements are evaluated and robustness of the approach is validated.