Block Cycle Durability Schedule Generation for an Elastomeric Control Arm Bushing from 3 Channel Road Load Signals

This presentation was made at the NAFEMS Americas Conference "Simulation in the Automotive Industry: Creating the Next Generation Vehicle" held on the 16-18 March 2021.

The automotive engineering community is now confronting the largest technology transformation since its inception. The demand to manufacture cleaner, safer, and smarter vehicles, along with providing an overall enhanced driving and ride experience, has never been higher. As a result, engineering teams must discover, evaluate, and successfully implement leading-edge technology and methods to produce reliable, effective results.

Hence, the challenges for automotive engineers are enormous and require a significant increase in the upfront use of numerical simulation capabilities, methods, and processes such that they’re able to efficiently design, manufacture and deliver these innovative technologies to market in greater speeds than ever before.

Resource Abstract

Road load signals recorded at the test track, or generated from vehicle dynamics models are necessary to establish specifications for elastomer part durability. For many tasks, however, the full road load signals contain too much detail and therefore must be summarized in a compact way that preserves damage content and failure mode. We have developed a workflow for summarizing multichannel road load signals that is based on critical plane analysis, and takes into account rubber’s nonlinear behaviors. The workflow produces a block cycle schedule consisting of a subset of the key most-damaging motions from the original road load signal, with each block repeated in proportions that closely reproduce the damage and failure mode of the original signal.