• Transactions of the Korean Society of Automotive Engineers
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• v.20 no.6
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• pp.100-106
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• 2012

Recently, the demand to acquire and improve durability performance has steadily risen in rubber components design. In design process of a rubber component, an analytical prediction is the most effective way to improve fatigue life. Existing methods of analytical estimation have mainly used an equation for fatigue life obtained from fatigue test data. However, such formula is rarely used due to costs and time required for fatigue testing, as well as randomness of rubber materials. In this paper, we describe fatigue life estimation of rubber component using only the results from a relatively simple tearing test. We estimated fatigue life of the Janggu type fatigue specimen and the automotive motor mount, and evaluated reliability of the proposed method by comparing the estimated values with actual test results.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.36 no.12
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• pp.1669-1674
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• 2012

A commonly analytical estimation of fatigue life on rubber components is using fatigue life equation based on various fatigue test results. However, such method has very restricted applicability in actual designing processes because performing fatigue tests requires a lot of time and money. In addition, non-standard rubber materials and their randomness make it hard to make databases. In this paper, the other fatigue life estimation method using tearing energy was suggested. We performed static and dynamic tearing test about automotive vibration rubber materials and a finite element formulation using a virtual crack to calculate the tearing energy of rubber components with complicated shapes. To using the suggested method, fatigue life of an automotive motor mount has been estimated and verified the reliability of this method by using comparison between the estimated values and the actual fatigue life.