Summer Intern Improves CV Boot Durability using fe-safe/Rubber
Endurica’s technology in fe-safe/Rubber™ offers rubber developers the opportunity to reap the benefits of fatigue analysis at the design stage. The technology is purpose-developed for elastomers and handles rubber’s finite-strain kinematics, hyperelastic stress-strain behavior, strain crystallization, temperature-dependence and other effects such as ozone attack. These effects are integrated with widely accepted procedures such as critical plane analysis, fracture mechanics and rainflow counting to provide a complete system capable of accounting for very complex duty cycles, including multiaxial loadings and variable amplitudes.
Recently, Endurica’s summer intern ran an optimization analysis on automotive CV joint boots using Abaqus to model the boot in operation, and fe-safe/Rubber to calculate fatigue life. With no previous experience and just a few days of training, he was able to model and analyze CV boots using four materials with different design features (material, fillet radius, wall thickness, and pre-loading in compression or tension). In a matter of weeks he was able to thoroughly explore the CV boot design space for fatigue performance, using numerical simulation of possible changes in material, geometry, and loading. The study will be published soon at Rubbernews.com.
Worse life: 3.47*10^11 Better life :7.08*10^12 cycles
(a cycle is one revolution of the wheel while the wheel is turned 30 degrees in this case). The life was improved by around 20 times
The U.S. Army is using the technology in the development of rubber components for the track system of military ground vehicles. Other customers include organizations in the heavy equipment, consumer products, offshore, medical devices and automotive sectors.
fe-safe/Rubber™ is a fully integrated version of Endurica’s fatigue solver technology, taking advantage of fe-safe’s friendly user interface and direct links to leading Finite Element codes
