A Semi-Analytical Method to Generate Load Cases For CAE Durability Using Virtual Vehicle Prototypes

The growing competition of the automotive market makes more and more necessary the reduction of development time and consequently, the increase of the capacity to quickly respond to the launching of the competitors. One of the most costly phases on the vehicle development process is the field durability test, both in function of the number of prototypes employed and the time needed to its execution.

More and more diffused, the fatigue life prediction methods have played an important part in the durability analysis via CAE. Nevertheless, in order they can be reliable and really being able to reduce the development time and cost, they need to be provided with load cases that can accurately represent the field durability tests.

This paper presents an efficient method to generate such a load cases, called Semi-Analytical Road Loads. It consists of a process to cascade loads acquired from the hub of a vehicle instrumented with set of wheel force transducers (WFT) to the relevant points of the suspension/body interface with the use of models generated into the ADAMS, a multi-body dynamics simulation software.