Resumen de A practical approach to virtual testing in automotive engineering
F.T.M.J.M. Huizinga, R.A.A. Van Ostaijen, A. Van Oosten Slingeland
The time available for development is becoming shorter and shorter. At the same time, the demands set for the characteristics of a car (e.g. noise and vibration, fatigue life, crash behaviour) are becoming increasingly stringent. A significant amount of the available development time is taken up by various verification tests. Besides the time involved, they are generally also expensive. At PD&E, computer-aided engineering (CAE) tools are currently being used to reduce the number of physical tests by simulating these tests, rather than performing them. This paper focuses on the use of CAE to simulate fatigue life related tests. The complexity of these tests varies from (relatively simple) component strength tests to full-scale vehicle fatigue life tests. In the methodology used for fatigue life analysis, the loads applied to the body are either measured (e.g. on a test track) or computed. In the latter case, a mechanical system analysis is frequently performed on a complete vehicle model to simulate the car driving on the test track. These (transient) loads are subsequently used to compute fatigue life. This paper explains the methodology in general, and in more detail for the fatigue life characteristics.
