Theoretical Fatigue Life Estimation as a Tool for Vehicle Body Development

Apart from crash simulation, theoretical simulation of the static and dynamic structure behavior is another integral part of vehicle body development. Due to the complex boundary conditions, however, this tool has not been used before as a development aid in this field. With respect to further reduction of development time, a reliable simulation technique for the time-consuming structure durability test runs is desirable.

The presented technique allows the relative evaluation of the individual development steps regarding component strength. Thus only the most essential variants need to be tested, and future body development could be possible by designing two prototype generations only.