Abstract
The automotive weather strip has functions of isolating water, dust, noise and vibration from outside. To achieve good sealing performance, weather strip should be designed to have the high contact force and wide contact area. However, these design causes excessive permanent deformation of weather strip. The causes of permanent deformation are generally explained to be the chemical material deterioration and physical variation and cyclic loading, etc. This paper introduces a numerical method to predict the permanent deformation using the time dependent viscoelastic model which is represented by Prony series in ABAQUS. Uniaxial tension and creep tests were conducted to obtain the material data. And the laboratory test (simplification test) for the permanent deformation was accelerated during shorter time, 300 hours. The permanent deformation of weather strip was successfully predicted under the different loading conditions and different section shapes using the suggested numerical process.
Keywords: Permanent deformation, Weather strip, Viscoelastic, Creep, Finite element analysis