Highway Trailer Pneumatic Suspension Bracket Development Using Test Data and Meshless Simulation Technology

This paper presents a new product development cycle focused on moving the simulation technology from the middle and late cycles of the design process to the front of it. The main goal on this shift is to reduce the time-to-market and costs while increasing the product innovation. The proposed workflow includes the use of meshless technology in the concept definition phase of the design and the use of the finite element method to validate the final version of the design. The workflow was expanded to include the usage of test data to define realistic load cases to correctly dimensioning of the component to accommodate the project criterions. In this study the commercial software Altair SimSolid and Altair OptiStruct were used to evaluate the proposed design structural performance in the design proposals and the test data used to define the model’s boundary conditions were obtained combining roads that represent the Suspensys accelerated durability procedure. The resulting product from this workflow was a pneumatic suspension bracket with the same mass as the original design but 5% stiffer, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.

This document also covers the procedure description for the proposed development cycle. Including the virtual model construction, a comparison between the methods in terms of time and effort required to build the model in the pre-processing phase, computational time, and cost to perform the calculation, as well as the answers found during post-processing to ensure that the benefits of implementing a new methodology will not compromise the accuracy of the final result. Concepts needed to define the test duration and roads used on the physical test and processing of the measured data will also be presented.