FEA Based Fatigue Life Estimation of Automotive Component Correlated with Fatigue Data Editing Technique

Abstract

A computational approach based on finite element analysis (FEA) for integrated durability assessment in an automotive component is presented. For further time saving related durability evaluation, the objective of this research is to investigate how accurately a road data history can be edited. A road data has been collected using a fatigue data acquisition system. A substantial compression for automotive lower suspension arm fatigue damage was performed for the purpose of accelerated fatigue data analysis. FEA was then used to estimate the fatigue life for the original and the edited data using two different strain life models. The original road data has been successfully edited for the purpose of damage predicting using FEA with a big difference in the software spending time for the component fatigue life prediction. As a result, the editing method was shown to be useful for summarising long histories and resulting in significantly shorter analysis with presenting the predicted amount of the fatigue damage as the original histories. As a consequence of application for automotive lower suspension arm, this technique can be applied in performing a fatigue history editing, especially in compression of data set.