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In the competitive automotive market, industries are looking to reduce the product cost and its launch time. This work presents a vehicle accelerator pedal development using CAE tools to evaluate the design proposal and also a unique physical test performed in the final design. The objective of CAE analysis is to simulate the fatigue loading of the accelerator pedal bracket and dash area due to the accelerator pedal duty cycle. The simulation goal is to predict the likelihood of a fatigue failure and its severity in the accelerator dash mount with an estimative of the fatigue life. After the CAE design evaluation, it was performed a rig test and vehicle durability test, in order to approve the accelerator pedal new design. This job allowed saving engineer and physical test cost in a short development cycle.

Nowadays design and product engineers are looking to reduce costs and shorten time-to-market by eliminating physical prototypes and producing superior products by performing analysis earlier in the design cycle. In this way CAE analyses are normally used to direct the product development and to help to solve field failures. One of advantages that Finite Element analyses can provide is the possibility to change the parts design, implement ribs, reinforcements and change the material properties and thickness in a fast way and present the best solution for the part evaluated besides the great engineering cost reduction. This paper presents a finite element analysis performed on a vehicle jack support that needed to be improved to withstand durability peak loads. After defining the stress reduction target, the jack support was evaluated applying static and dynamic loads for several design proposals.

The growing competition of the automotive market makes more and more necessary the reduction of development time and consequently, the increase of the capacity to quickly respond to the launching of the competitors. One of the most costly phases on the vehicle development process is the field durability test, both in function of the number of prototypes employed and the time needed to its execution. More and more diffused, the fatigue life prediction methods have played an important part in the durability analysis via CAE. Nevertheless, in order they can be reliable and really being able to reduce the development time and cost, they need to be provided with load cases that can accurately represent the field durability tests. This work presents a CAE approach used for light trucks in order to get a reasonable understanding of component durability behavior due to payload increase. In general, road load data is not available for a new payload condition.

With regard to structures design, we can divide structural optimization into three types: topology, shape and sizing. This work deals with the topological and sizing optimization, which can be considered at the conceptual and detailed design stages, respectively. The former refers to the optimization of a rear cabin suspension bracket, where the cost function is the structure compliance, which should be minimized, with a material volume restriction. The latter is regarding the optimization of a frame air filter bracket, being the objective function the material volume, which should also be minimized, subjected to a natural frequency restriction. Structural analyses are performed using the finite elements method.

The objective of this paper is to present the importance of forming simulation analysis result on crash analysis and learn the methodology to transfer effects from the forming into the crash analysis. Simulations of forming processes and crash events are well known and are carried out on a daily basis in industry, but the combined simulation is rather new. Through the forming simulation analysis it is obtained the part thickness variation, which induces some thickness changes, working hardening, residual stresses, etc. Our proposal on this work is to use theses results on crash analysis and evaluate its importance.