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Automotive vehicles undergo various ranges of road loads according to the driving conditions. Sometimes it experiences unusually large overload such as pot-hole impact or curb strike whose forces are several times of the vehicle weight. Those overloads may induce plastic deformations at some components and these plastic deformations reduce the fatigue life of the components. In some cases, the fatigue crack initiation points may be changed due to the residual stresses which were generated by the overloads.

Product development is becoming more complex. It involves not only system simulation requirements, but also the need to manage and share huge amounts of engineering information that is housed throughout the world. It quickly becomes complex when getting into detailed system simulation for powertrain applications such as sealing products.

Skid a full vehicle against a curb in lateral and longitudinal direction are two out of several tests to proof the strength of a suspension. Knowing the internal forces acting on suspension components during such an event is extremely important for being able to dimension safety critical parts correctly. Measuring these loads is an elaborate task, because the use of wheel force transducers is not possible due the risk of damaging them. It is necessary to apply strain gauges and force cells instead.

In this study, carried out by fka, the hood of the VW Golf V is taken as an example to analyze the potential of a hybrid construction of aluminum and steel. Structural stiffness, oil canning and dent resistance behavior are analyzed using Abaqus/Standard. With the objective of reducing the total hood weight, the performance of the hood is compared to reference values of the series production steel hood.

Fatigue life prediction has reached a high level in respect to practical handling and accuracy in the last decades. As a result of insecure or lacking input data deviations between numerical results and test results in terms of cycles till crack initiation are possible. On the one hand, the accuracy of Finite Element results gets better and better because of greatly increasing computer power and mesh density. Whereas on the other hand, the situation is much more critical regarding load data and especially regarding local material properties of the components.

In 2006 BMW made a decision to use Abaqus/Explicit for all issues concerning passive safety in the virtual design process. Code quality and reliability of simulation results were identified as the primary reasons to change, and from that decision point forward, all product development teams began migration activities to switch to Abaqus/Explicit.

An analysis of bridge roller bearings was performed using Abaqus as part of a failure investigation. Finite element analyses were conducted to gain an understanding of the stresses caused during operation and explain the possible cause of failure. Models of the bearings were required to represent the contact between the roller and plates, daily movement of the load and the non-linear behaviour of the material.

Fatigue is the main in-service failure mode for automotive chassis & suspension parts,

Over the past three years, BMW has undertaken a significant project to first investigate,
then proceed with migration from its present crash simulation software to ABAQUS. This project
has been motivated by a growing recognition within BMW that, in order to advance its crash

General Motors, in conjunction with SIMULIA Great Lakes, have developed a studio of

Transient dynamic simulations gain importance in the automotive industry and modern fatigue postprocessors are apt to evaluate the fatigue damage. However, additional insight into a structure’s behaviour may be obtained from observing the displacements. Displacement patterns are important for design engineers in order to improve the structure. With proportional static loads it is trivial to display and understand the displacements, but the displacements in dynamic simulations are often very complicated.

MAHLE Powertrain (MPT) is constantly exploring new ways to improve the efficiency and
performance of engines to meet the demanding objectives Automotive OEM’s are faced with
today, i.e. to reduce fuel consumption and emissions. MPT’s key expertise lies in the development of high performance engines with low emissions and excellent fuel economy through the optimisation of gas exchange, combustion, friction and durability.

Hybrid III dummies are among the most frequently used dummies in both industry and academia for vehicle crash safety. Abaqus is one of most widely applied finite element codes in the world. To meet the needs of crash safety analysis and to exploit the potential of the Abaqus/Explicit code, a family of HIII dummies, including HII 50th male, 5th female and 95th male dummies, were developed at FTSS in collaboration with Simulia and BMW. This paper describes in detail the development of the HIII dummies with specific reference to the HIII 50th dummy.

Mercury Marine outboards, engines, and drives are designed to withstand indoor impact testing (called “logstrike”) that simulates a collision with an underwater object. This test is comprised of an outboard or sterndrive device mounted on a mock boat that collides with a simulated log.

For a system which involves a fluid medium contained inside a deformable structure, such as a fuel tank system, a simulation which couples the structure and fluid may be required depending on the system performance metric of interest. Simulation methods for fluid / structure interaction (FSI) have been gradually developed by CAE engineers since the advent of increased computing power. A limitation in using previous FSI simulations is the dynamic event time period that the FSI method can simulate.

In the quest to lower environmental impact while maintaining vehicle performance, automakers and aerospace companies are knocking on the same door – that is, increasing use of composite materials in order to reduce structural mass. It can be expected that material costs will drop considerably over the next few to several years, as the capacity to produce such materials begins to catch up with the growing demand. The benefits of using these materials are well-documented, including their substantial capacity to absorb energy in an impact scenario.

The use of iSight to automate Inergy's simulations related to automotive plastic fuel tank development is highlighted by three examples: 1. the static venting simulation, where the low added value part (finding the position of valves on the tank so that the customer's specifications are fulfilled) is automated. This allows the expert to focus on higher added value tasks. 2. the tank aging simulation, which consists in computing the permanent deformation of the fuel tank caused by the plastic creep.

Typically thermo-mechanical analysis including complexities such as contacts and bolt preloads are carried out using three dimensional models. These analyses require significant time and effort in FE model building, analysis setup, solution, and results processing. It also requires special effort to ensure it is error free.
In order to get stable and accurate results element size and time step selection is very important in transient analysis. These aspects are discussed in this paper.

Mine scale finite element simulations are now a key design and planning tool for some of the
world’s largest and most challenging open pit and deep underground mining projects. Models

The automotive and heavy-duty industries are heavy users of Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) for development, design and performance optimization of their products. As a
technology driven company, the Sealing Products Group of Dana Holding Corporation utilizes

Oblique elastic impact of spheres and the related case for cylinders have been studied cases for many years in simulations of systems with loose supports, such as heat exchanger tube-support interaction, as well as granular flows and robotic task modeling. The problem is a relative simple one in the class of transient frictional contact problems in that the stresses away from the contact zone are typically neglected. The available continuum model solutions from literature show some very interesting features.

The fire resistance of steel framed multi story buildings and their ability to withstand
exposure to fully developed fire conditions without the need for all structural members to be

Due to the limitation of computer capacity and the soften of the material constitution, the nonlinear dynamic earthquake analyses of skyscrapers are not practical in engineer’s desktop, and even in the research area they are still open problems. Utilizing ABAQUS’s unique combination of implicit and explicit technologies and capable of solving large problem efficiently, the author solves the problem elegantly and practically. In the analysis model, all members and shear-walls are modeled by plastic zone model, and large deflection effects are taking into account.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigates accidents to identify the probable cause and to make recommendations that would prevent similar accidents. Following the collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis on August 1, 2007, the NTSB worked with the Federal Highway Administration, the Minnesota Department of Transportation and other parties with information and expertise, including SIMULIA Central, to determine the circumstances that contributed to the collapse of the bridge, completing the investigation in 15 months.

There are plans of constructing bridges longer span like Messina strait bridge. This
trend causes the necessity of discussing on the problems of instability analysis such as lateraltorsional buckling. However, lateral torsional buckling analysis of long span bridge is not
sufficiently taken yet. For that reason, we apply the Abaqus/Standard to solve the high nonlinear problem. The analysis object is Akashi-kaikyo Bridge which is the longest bridge in the world. This paper presents how to analyze the lateral-torsional buckling of long span bridge applying wind load.