• International Journal of Automotive Technology
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.129-135
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• 2002

Durability estimation of a prototype vehicle has traditionally relied heavily on accelerated durability tests using predefined proving grounds or rig tests using a road simulator. By use of those tests, it is very difficult to predict durability failures in actual service environments. This motivated the development of an integrated CAE (Computer Aided Engineering) methodology for the durability estimation of a prototype vehicle in actual service environments. Since expensive computational costs such as computation time and hardware resources are required for a full vehicle simulation in those environments with a very long span of event time, the conventional CAE methodologies have little feasibility. An efficient computational methodology for durability estimations is applied with theoretical developments. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology is shown by the comparison of results of the typical actual service environment such as the city mode with those of the typical accelerated durability test over the Belgian road.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Manufacturing Technology Engineers
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• v.18 no.6
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• pp.614-620
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• 2009

A fuel tank of a vehicle is an important part due to its flammable contents ant its importance during crash conditions. Therefore, the fuel tank's design should be assessed for durability and robustness to ensure safety during the early development phase. Previously, evaluation for the durability was done by testing in physical driving conditions which could only be done after the completion of the vehicle. Computation simulation is a more effective method to evaluate the strength and durability of the fuel tank during the early stage. In this paper, two outstanding computational simulation methods are studied. One evaluates PV cycle fatigue due to build up pressure in the fuel tank and the other evaluates the PSD vibration fatigue from modal characteristics. The results show that computational methods agree with physical tests and are thus suitable to analyze the strength and durability of the fuel tank at early development phase.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.375-388
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• 2008

Crack opening governs many transfer properties that play a pivotal role in durability analyses. Instead of trying to combine continuum and discrete models in computational analyses, it would be attractive to derive from the continuum approach an estimate of crack opening, without considering the explicit description of a discontinuous displacement field in the computational model. This is the prime objective of this contribution. The derivation is based on the comparison between two continuous variables: the distribution if the effective non local strain that controls damage and an analytical distribution of the effective non local variable that derives from a strong discontinuity analysis. Close to complete failure, these distributions should be very close to each other. Their comparison provides two quantities: the displacement jump across the crack [U] and the distance between the two profiles. This distance is an error indicator defining how close the damage distribution is from that corresponding to a crack surrounded by a fracture process zone. It may subsequently serve in continuous/discrete models in order to define the threshold below which the continuum approach is close enough to the discrete one in order to switch descriptions. The estimation of the crack opening is illustrated on a one-dimensional example and the error between the profiles issued from discontinuous and FE analyses is found to be of a few percents close to complete failure.