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Commercial vehicle industry is often provoked to assess suitability of the most currently available steels in lieu of traditionally used ones. Such material substitutions are attempted even if the existing ones happen to be tried, tested and proven over a period of time. Motivation for an exercise of this sort is usually from the considerations of favorable cost, availability, manufacturability, durability, strength-to-weight ratio, etc. A rigorous route to carry-out such a feasibility study would be through physical prototyping and testing. This is usually an expensive and time consuming proposition. Virtual analysis, on the other hand is a more viable option. This paper proposes an even easier alternative of using the available test data to estimate fatigue life of an identical component made of a different material through use of established rules such as Neuber's.

This paper presents the use of CAE tools at the up-stream stage of design of ribs in a wind deflector, and experimental validation of the design. Wind deflector is an add-on device used on top of truck cabins for reducing drag. Based on the field conditions that the wind deflector is subjected to, design requirements were formulated. One of the requirements was to provide stiffening ribs in the deflector. Topology optimization analysis was performed to arrive at the optimum layout of the stiffening ribs. The layout was finalized after comparing the results from two commercially available FEA tools - namely, ANSYS and Altair Optistruct. Finite element static analysis and random vibration dynamic analysis were performed in order to validate the strength of the deflector. A prototype of the wind deflector was made and tested under laboratory condition for dynamic loads. The analysis and testing results demonstrated that the design was robust.