Vehicle Suspension Misuse Assessment with Simplified Virtual Model

In the automotive industry, the structural evaluation of suspension systems under customer abusive loads (misuse loads) is essential. The vehicle may experience the abusive loads in fore-aft, lateral and vertical directions. From a design perspective, it is crucial that the suspension should be robust enough to withstand the abusive loading due to maneuvers on various terrains. The main challenge during virtual simulation of these load cases is the time required to complete the assessment. The current method involves a detailed suspension finite element (FE) model which takes considerable computational and post processing time. Any kind of manual mistakes will further increase assessment time. The time becomes even more crucial when the product is in the final stages of the development process where quick turnaround is required. This paper describes the way through which we can reduce the size of the virtual model during any enabler study under misuse assessment without affecting the results. Based on the vehicle maneuvering, few components in the suspension system take huge load and remaining parts don’t carry much load. Therefore, the portion of the FE model which plays the major role in the particular loading will be considered in detail while the other portion can be represented as the linear beams or can be removed based on their contribution. This method will help to get the results faster for all the possible enablers. The best enabler design can be verified later with a complete FE model for validation. With this approach, nearly 70% of time can be saved.