Considerations in Shock Towers Accelerations, Used in Stress and Fatigue Life Prediction in Automotive Structural Parts 2008-36-0114

The competition of the market pushes the automotive industry to a continuous evolution of the performance, durability and safety for the current vehicles, balancing them with a competitive price and launch time, using new technologies, in a wide range of disciplines. Among these disciplines, it is possible to highlight the durability, which cares for the various parts of cars that are structurally feasible, considering criteria for usage, safety and life (DAKIN, 2001).

Basically, a durability team has available three methodologies for the assessment of structural parts developed: Test Track, Workbenches and Numeric Simulations. Test Tracks, the oldest of the three methodologies, allows a correlation with the usage of the product by the final consumer. However, the introduction of the Workbenches makes the test environment more controlled, reducing the number of the involved variables, and thus reduces the time to test and improve the quality of results (GROTE, 2000). The Computer Aided Engineering, is more recent in the development process of vehicles, and despite the constant development, it still needs more detailed formulations, in order to be able to model phenomena that, if ignored, affect the correlation with the results on Test Track, Workbenches and finally, the final customer usage (DANNBAUER, 2005).

The article aims to report the results found in comparing the shock towers accelerations measures in an instrumented vehicle, when subjected to events in a Test Track tests, and tests on a Four Post Workbench.