Today's automotive industry demands high quality component as well as system designs within very short period of time to provide more value added features to customers on one hand and to meet stringent safety standards on the other. To reconcile economy issues, design optimization has become a key issue.
In the last few decades, many OEMs took to analytical tools like Computer-Aided-Engineering (CAE) tools in order to decrease the number of prototype builds and to speed up the time of development cycle. Although such analytical tools are relatively inexpensive to use and faster to implement as compared to the costly traditional design and testing processes: however, there are many variables that CAE tools cannot adequately consider, such as manufacturing processes, assembly, material anisotropy and residual stresses. Therefore, still smart measuring and testing techniques are required to substantiate the CAE results.
In today's automotive scenario, though Electric power steering system(EPS) is gaining importance, Hydraulic Power steering system is still a common feature in almost all passenger cars in many of the developing countries, basically because of the cost and non-availability of advanced technologies.
This paper presents a detailed description of problems faced during development of power steering rack & pinion mountings and test procedure developed for reproduction of the Road Load Data (RLD) over constant amplitude loading test bench. Using CAE, the initial and further design iterations of rack & pinion mountings were analyzed for the failure modes and based on the analysis results, new proposals of the same were suggested.