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Pipes are used at different places in modern vehicules. They ensure different functions: flexible brake pipes (great length, high flexibility and internal pressure), fuel and coolant pipes (preformed pipes, submitted to temperature, wide sections), gearbox and throttle pipes (embedding cables), … These flexible pipes are submitted to various loadings: pressure, temperature, dynamic excitations. Moreover, each of them has specific characteristics: some of them are very flexible, other ones are preformed. Independently of their use, these pipes interact with the carbody since they are attached (either by their ends or along their length) at several points: some of these pipes being located close other components, the designers must avoid any contact during typical manoeuvres. Furthermore, pipes may also vibrate due to their natural eigen frequencies or due to an external solicitation.

Vehicle dynamics is a discipline of mechanical engineering that benefited of significant improvements thanks to the progress of computational engineering. Vehicle dynamics engineers are using CAE for the development of a vehicle with MBS and FEA. The concurrent use of these two technologies is a standard in the automotive industry. However the current simulation process is not fully efficient because local geometrical and material nonlinearities are not accurately modeled in classical MBS software. This paper introduces a methodology for vehicle dynamics simulation integrating MBS capabilities in one single nonlinear FEA environment enabling an accurate modeling of nonlinearity in vehicles.