CAE Used for Durability Analysis - A Case Study

In the recent years the automotive industry has become very focused on reducing product development time and increasing quality of product. This need caused automotive industry to reduce the number of physical prototypes and rely more on Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) for sizing and final design of vehicles. This paper describes simplified and automated methodology to predict durability using CAE methods. The approach is used to access durability of automotive sheet metal structure. A new method for locating failure zones in sheet metal structures is proposed. This method is based on the concept of modal strain energy and is verified by comparing analytical results with field failure data. Thus CAE can prove effective tool to reduce time and cost in design and product development of automotive components.