• Transactions of the Korean Society of Automotive Engineers
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• v.3 no.6
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• pp.96-111
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• 1995

A bellows is a component installed in the automobile exhaust system to reduce the impact from an engine. It's stiffness has a great influence on the natural frequency of the system. Therefore, it must be designed to keep the specified stiffness that requires in the system. This study present the finite element analysis of U-typed bellows using a curved conical frustum element and the shape optimal design with specified stiffness. The finite element analysis is verified by comparing with the experimental results. In the shape optimal design, the weight is considered as the cost function. The specified stiffness from the system design is transformed to equality constraints. The formulation has inequality constraints imposed on the fatigue limit, the natural frequencies, the buckling load and the manufacturing conditions. A procedure for shape optimization adopts a thickness, a corrugation radius, and a length of annular plate as optimal design variables. The external loading conditions include the axial and lateral loads with a boundary condition fixed at an end of the bellows. The recursive quadratic programming algorithm is selected to solve the problem. The result are compared with the existing bellows, and the characteristics of the bellows is investigated through the optimal design process. The optimized shape of the bellows are expected to give quite a good guideline to the practical design.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers
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• v.19 no.6
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• pp.1439-1450
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• 1995

Bellows is a familiar component in piping systems as it provides a relatively simple means of absorbing thermal expansion and providing system flexibility. In routine piping flexibility analysis by finite element methods, bellows is usually considered to be straight pipe runs modified by an appropriate flexibility factor; maximum stresses are evaluated using a corresponding stress concentration factor. The aim of this study is to develop a bellows finite element, which similarly includes more complex shell type deformation patterns. This element also does not require flexibility or stress factors, but evaluates more detailed deformation and stress patterns. The proposed bellows element is a 3-D, 2-noded line element, with three degrees of freedom per node and no bending. It is formulated by including additional 'internal' degrees of freedom to account for the deformation of the bellows corrugation; specifically a quarter toroidal section of the bellows, loaded by axial force, is considered and the shell type deformation of this is include by way of an approximating trigonometric series. The stiffness of each half bellows section may be found by minimising the potential energy of the section for a chosen deformation shape function. An experiment on the flexibility is performed to verify the reliability for bellows finite element.