Automotive OEMS are continuously working on improvements of their vehicle development processes, to improve quality, reduce lead time and cost. In particular the enhancement of virtual methods is crucial for manufacturing engineering to enable the elimination of physical prototype builds and thus to reduce development cost and time. By analyzing the main issues in reduction of physical builds, compliant parts were identified as being most critical, since their digital representation does not coincide with the reality, so that many changes needed to be made after first hardware validation.
As input for compliant part analysis software the material properties have to be specified to allow simplified handling of these parts as homogeneous objects. This is a completely new task for automotive industry, since this data was not needed before and is thus unknown. In detail, for a realistic analysis of the real behavior of compliant parts the bending stiffness or equivalently the Young's modulus, together with the density and Poisson's ratio are needed.
A validation showed, that a lot of cables could be modeled quite well using a linear elasticity approach with the described properties. Since the sensitivity of the cables regarding the shape is really low regarding these material properties, the simple measurement setup is already sufficient for a lot of applications mainly from the design and packaging area and is already used globally. Further activities to improve the accuracy of material properties for nonstandard cables and hoses are ongoing.
