Abstract
The vehicle development process requires an appropriate durability based design with actual service loads. In the early design phase of vehicle development computer aided durability analysis will be helpful to predict life cycle design issues before high cost prototype vehicle production and physical tests. Over the last few decades, FE methods have been widely utilized for structural analysis but CAE tools have limited usage for fatigue life estimation due to difficulties in determination of the major inputs of fatigue analysis such as loading data and the cyclic properties of the material. In this paper, an integrated computer aided durability analysis method is proposed for durability estimation of a city bus with actual test rig data. The load history derived by running accelerated actual test rig data on multi-body dynamics model. Also realistic behavior of suspension established with modeling air suspension in ESAY5 and co-simulating with ADAMS/Car. In order to obtain time independent part of the fatigue analysis such as stress coefficients, a general purpose finite element analysis code MSC/NASTRAN is used. MSC Fatigue database is used for material properties.
Keywords: computational durability analysis, fatigue life prediction, urban bus, multibody dynamics modeling, four-poster test rig