• Transactions of the Korean Society of Automotive Engineers
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.104-112
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• 2014

Generally, numerical approaches of evaluation for vehicle seat comfort have been studied without considering time-dependent characteristics and the only seating moment have been considered in seat design. However, the comfort not only at the seating moment but also in the long-term should be evaluated because the passengers are sitting repeatedly on the seat to drive the vehicle for hours. So, the aim of this paper is to carry out a quantitative evaluation of the time-dependent mechanical characteristics of seat foams and to suggest a process for predicting the viscoelastic deformation of seat foam in response to long-term driving. To characterize the seat materials, uniaxial compression and tension tests were carried out for the seat foam and stress relaxation tests were performed for evaluating the viscoelastic behavior of the seat foam. A unit solid element model was used to verify the reliability of the material model with respect to the compression behavior of the seat foam. It is not straightforward to evaluate the time-dependent compression of foams using the explicit solver because the viscoelastic material model is limited. To use the explicit solver, the material model must be modified using stress-degradation data. Normalized stress relaxation moduli were added to the stress-strain curves obtained under static conditions to achieve a time-dependent set of stress-strain relations that were compatible with the implicit solver. There was good agreement between the analysis results and experimental data.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.28 no.9
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• pp.1062-1069
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• 2011

In electro-galvanizing line to manufacture the electro-galvanized steel sheet, polishing system is required to maintain clean surface of conductor roll and to secure the quality of the steel sheet. At the same time, prediction and decision of the replacement cycle for felt material and its brush installed in the polishing system is also important because the brush is directly contacted on the conductor roll surface. In this study, the polishing system has been designed which the brush is repetitive translating according to the longitudinal direction of the conductor roll. Furthermore, the prediction on the wear-life of the felt material used for the brush is performed using the contact pressure extracted by finite element analysis. And to verify the predicted wear-life of the felt material, the experimental study is also carried out. From the comparison result between the predicted and the measured wear-life of the felt material, it is presented that the wear-life and the replacement cycle of the felt material are well predicted by considering a wear compensation factor, and the wear compensation factor is useful and reasonable.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.35 no.11
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• pp.1471-1476
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• 2011

The catalytic converter in the front part of an automobile's exhaust system converts toxic exhaust gas into nontoxic gas. The substrate in the central part of the converter has a circular or oval-shaped cross section and fine lattice-shaped walls. In the canning process, the substrate is wrapped in mats and inserted into a can. During this process, mat pressure is induced, which may cause brittle fracturing in the substrate. In this paper, a finite element program for determining the mat pressure distribution was developed to avoid these fractures. The program was created in Microsoft EXCEL, so the input and output procedures are relatively simple. It was assumed that the substrate is rigid, the mat is material nonlinear, and the can is linear elastic. The can is modeled as a beam element to resist both bending and uniform tension/compression. The number of elements is fixed to 35, and the number of iterations, to 20. The solutions are compared to ABAQUS solutions and found to be in good agreement.