APPLICATION OF FINITE-ELEMENT ANALYSIS IN THE DESIGN OF AUTOMOTIVE ELASTOMERIC COMPONENTS

Despite the recognition of the need for more detailed and accurate mechanical analysis during the development stages, the design of automotive elastomeric components still remains a seat-of-the-pants cut-and-dry process. The present reluctance by many designers to use finite-element analysis (FEA) is largely based on a number of misconceptions about the procedures. The purpose of this paper is to address these misconceptions and to demonstrate how FEA can be beneficially applied in product design in various stages of development ranging from material fracture characterization to predicting final design performance. The capability for analyzing components constructed of elastomeric materials which, to a reasonable degree of approximation, can be idealized using incompressible hyperelastic material models, is a feature in a number of commercially marketed finite-element software programs.