Pipes are used at different places in modern vehicules. They ensure different functions: flexible brake pipes (great length, high flexibility and internal pressure), fuel and coolant pipes (preformed pipes, submitted to temperature, wide sections), gearbox and throttle pipes (embedding cables), …
These flexible pipes are submitted to various loadings: pressure, temperature, dynamic excitations. Moreover, each of them has specific characteristics: some of them are very flexible, other ones are preformed. Independently of their use, these pipes interact with the carbody since they are attached (either by their ends or along their length) at several points: some of these pipes being located close other components, the designers must avoid any contact during typical manoeuvres. Furthermore, pipes may also vibrate due to their natural eigen frequencies or due to an external solicitation.
This paper describes a general design tool able to deal with these particular situations at early stage of development (in the design stage). This tool being used by designers, it must be integrated into a CAD environment and interact with features available in this environment. A brake pipe on a half front axle is simulated using TEA Pipe Beams for CATIA V5. Pipes are first connected and mounted in their original position using a non-linear finite element solver. Kinematics and dynamic excitation are then entered and finally, results are shown including: natural vibrations, envelope of pipes during kinematics, forced vibrations, …
This tool embeds non linear finite elements solutions which are totally transparent CAD users. The original integration of these numerical solutions allows fast computation times (a few minutes) and so increase the number of configurations which can be investigated in the design stage.