Abstract
Due to increasing government regulations concerning the emissions of vehicles (air polution and noise), the necessary reduction of oil and raw material con-sumption and customer requirements - sound engineering etc. - the automotive industry more and more is forced to optimize the NVH behaviour of engines and to reduce the vehicle weight. Anyway these goals always have to be tightly connected to the maintainance of the fatigue behaviour.
The use of numerical methods such as the finite ele-ment method (FEM) enables detailed information about the static and the dynamic behaviour of structures to be determined during the development stage /1/. It can be an excellent tool to analyze and optimize structures by computer simulation and therefore can help to reduce time and costs required for prototyping and to avoid numerous test series.