Engine performance and emission control are key attributes in the overall engine development in which sealing of the mating components plays an important role to achieve the same. Rubber gaskets are being used for sealing of different Internal Combustion (IC) engine components. Gasket sealing performance needs to be ensured at initial development stage to avoid the design changes at the later part of development cycle. Design changes at later stage of development can potentially influence parameters like optimization, cost and time to market. Demand of utilization of virtual tools (front loading) is growing with the increasing challenges like stringent product development cycle time and overall project cost.
This paper describes a procedure to simulate the rubber gasket and groove for different material conditions (dimensional tolerances). This entire simulation is divided into two phases. In the first phase of the simulation, Load Deflection curve (LD curve) is established. This can be done through physical testing or from the 2 dimensional (2D) model of gasket. In the second phase of simulation, the above stated data i.e. the LD curve from 2D analysis is used in the 3D analysis. Special purpose gasket elements are used in the 3D model with gasket characteristics.
This paper also highlights the difficulties of usage of special purpose gasket elements in 3D analysis for non-planer region of the rubber gasket. An attempt has been done to provide an alternate solution based on the 3D explicit local gasket analysis to overcome limitations of special purpose gasket elements. Experimental validation for most commonly used rubber gaskets was carried out to establish the correlation of this process. Predicted results (leakage areas and Stresses) are well correlated with the experimental findings.