Sheet aluminum alloys have been used in manufacturing of machine structures. In fatigue crack propagation behavior of thin sheet aluminum alloys, it is important that fatigue crack growth rate is affected by crack closure phenomenon. In this work, we analyzed the characteristics of fatigue crack propagation behavior in experiment of constant stress condition for thin sheet Al 2024-T3 alloys, and identified the retardation behavior of crack growth by comparing experimental results of thin and thick plate specimen. We attempt to operate the fatigue life estimating process using the fatigue related material constants from referred fatigue crack propagation analysis. And we analyzed the experimental and prediction results of fatigue life of thin sheet aluminum alloy in order to identify the relation between retardation behavior of fatigue crack growth and crack closure phenomenon.

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.