Application of Reliability-Based Design Optimization to Durability of Military Vehicles

In the Army mechanical fatigue subject to external and inertia transient loads in the service life of mechanical systems often leads to a structural failure due to accumulated damage. Structural durability analysis that predicts the fatigue life of mechanical components subject to dynamic stresses and strains is a compute intensive multidisciplinary simulation process, since it requires the integration of several computer-aided engineering tools and considerable data communication and computation. Uncertainties in geometric dimensions due to manufacturing tolerances cause the indeterministic nature of the fatigue life of a mechanical component. Due to the fact that uncertainty propagation to structural fatigue under transient dynamic loading is not only numerically complicated but also extremely computationally expensive, it is a challenging task to develop a structural durability-based design optimization process and reliability analysis to ascertain whether the optimal design is reliable. The objective of this paper is the demonstration of an integrated CAD-based computer-aided engineering process to effectively carry out design optimization for structural durability, yielding a durable and cost-effectively manufacturable product. This paper shows preliminary results of reliability-based durability design optimization for the Army Stryker A-Arm.