Fatigue Life Prediction of Automotive Component Using the Virtual Road Profile
For the stress and vibration analysis of vehicle components by computer simulation, it is necessary to find the forces acting on the vehicle components due to the road profile undulation. A precise modeling of tires is not easy due to nonlinear effects between tire-ground. Instead of precise tire modeling, this paper proposes to regenerate the road profile, which preserves the measured wheel accelerations with a linear tire model in the computer simulations. From the full car example, the proposed method in this paper shows very nice results, and thus the new method seems well-suited in virtual driving simulations. The effort to improve durability of vehicle components has been continued during test and development process. Computer aided durability analysis techniques cut down time and money compared with experiment. In this paper, the dynamic simulation of vehicle model was carried out with the MSC/ADAMS program and the durability analysis of vehicle components was carried out with MSC/Fatigue program by using load profiles generated from dynamic simulation.