Failure Analysis of Serpentine V-ribbed Belt Drive System

A known factor which limits the life cycle performance of automotive front-end accessory serpentine belt drive is cracking of the elastomer located in the rib tip. In this paper, fracture mechanics was used to study crack growth in belt rib. Tearing energy and J-integral were employed to characterize the fracture behavior of rubber compound. A global-local strategy was adopted to predict the crack initiation in V-ribbed belt rib. The global finite element model of the belt was created with relatively coarse mesh. The local model with fine mesh around the crack tip region was used to evaluate the J-integral. The J-integral computed using finite element analysis was compared with the threshold value found by experiments to predict the onset of crack initiation in belt rib.