Fatigue Life Prediction of HVAC Pipe Assembly for Measured Powertrain Load by Virtual Simulation

Structural durability of automotive components is one of the key requirements in design and development of today’s automobiles. Virtual simulations are used to estimate component durability to save the cost and time required to build the components and testing.

The objective of this work is to find the service life of automotive HVAC pipe assembly by calculating cumulative fatigue life for operation under actual powertrain load conditions. Modal transient response analysis is performed with the measured powertrain load time history. Strain based fatigue life analysis is carried out using modal superposition method (MSM). The estimated fatigue life was compared with the physical test results. This paper also explains the root cause of low fatigue life on pipe assembly and provide the solution.