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This paper presents a fundamental conceptual change to the traditional CAE based fatigue analysis process. Traditional approaches take the responses from a stress solver and these are then transferred into a secondary fatigue analysis step. In this way fatigue is, and always has been, treated as a post processing step. The new conceptual change described in this paper involves combining the two separate tasks into one (stress and fatigue together). This results in a simple, elegant and more powerful Durability Management concept. This new process requires no large data files to be transferred, no complicated file management and it is likely that whole fatigue calculation process can be done in memory. This makes it possible to perform optimization with fatigue life as the constraint. It also facilitates full body fatigue life calculations, including dynamic behavior, for much larger models than was previously possible.

Durability of automotive structures is a primary engineering consideration that is evaluated during a vehicle's design and development. In addition, it is a basic expectation of consumers, who demand ever-increasing levels of quality and dependability. Automakers have developed corporate requirements for vehicle system durability which must be met before a products is delivered to the customer. To provide early predictions of vehicle durability, prior to the construction and testing of prototypes, it is necessary to predict the forces generated in the vehicle structure due to road inputs. This paper describes an application of the “virtual proving ground” approach for vehicle durability load prediction for a vehicle on proving ground road surfaces. Correlation of the results of such a series of simulations will be described, and the modeling and simulation requirements to provide accurate simulations will be presented.

Virtual proving ground (VPG) simulations have been popular with passenger vehicles. VPG uses LS-DYNA based non-linear contact Finite Element analysis (FEA) to estimate fully analytical road loads and to predict structural components durability with PG road surfaces and tire represented as Finite elements. Heavy vehicle industry has not used these tools extensively in the past due to the complexity of heavy vehicle systems and especially due to the higher number of tires in the vehicle compared to the passenger car. The higher number tires in the heavy vehicle requires more computational analysis duration compared to the passenger car. However due to the recent advancements in computer hardware, virtual proving ground simulations can be used for heavy vehicles. In this study we have used virtual proving ground based simulation studies to predict the durability performance of a trailer suspension frame.