If it’s not often, then it must be because wipers are considered one of the most reliable vehicle devices, with a design life average of 1.5 million wipes. Born and raised in a Boston suburb, I know that drivers are especially thankful for working windshield wipers during days of rain or in storms of slushy snow. Hyundai Motor Company is giving considerable attention to the wiper blades on their vehicles, as its R&D center has recently developed a unified analysis model where they could study both wiping and durability.

“The physics of windshield wipers are more complex than you might think,” said Sungjin Yoon, research engineer at Hyundai. “Previously, we’d been performing separate analyses for wiping and durability using two different FEA programs on two different computer models, but we wanted to develop a unified analysis model with which we could study both. Abaqus has a full range of simulation capabilities that allow us to analyze every aspect of the characteristics we were interested in studying within a single software package.”

Read more about Hyundai’s evaluation of the wiper blade in Automotive Engineering International Online or in Hyundai's 2011 SCC technical paper, "Application of CAE to Optimize Wiper System on Wiping and Fatigue Performance."