Search Results

The battery support in a small car is an example of a subsystem that lends itself to mounted component dynamic fatigue analysis, due to its weight and localized attachments. This paper describes a durability analysis method that was developed to define the required enforced motion, stress response, and fatigue life for such subsystems. The method combines the large mass method with the modal transient formulation to determine the dynamic stress responses. The large mass method was selected over others for its ease of use and efficiency when working with the modal formulation and known accelerations from a single driving point. In this example, these known accelerations were obtained from the drive files of a 4-DOF shake table that was used for corresponding lab tests of a rear compartment body structure. These drive files, originally displacements, were differentiated twice and filtered to produce prescribed accelerations to the finite element model.

Automotive engineering development processes are growing more dependent on the use of multi-body dynamic (MBD) models for generating vehicle loads that at one time could only be measured using physical hardware. A certain technique combines these two approaches using a minimal set of physical measurements to excite a vehicle MBD model for predicting loads at various vehicle interfaces. This approach eliminates the use of a tire model, often the roadblock in MBD-based loads prediction simulations. However, for various reasons, the direct application of loads to a model can lead to problems with the simulation. Alternatively, the model can be artificially constrained but this also has its disadvantages. The purpose of this paper is to present a loads prediction technique that relaxes the use of artificial boundary conditions for applications involving the input of measurements to an MBD model.