PRESENTATION OF RESEARCH RESULTS

FINITE ELEMENT SIMULATION OF TOWBARS

Author: ing. Oleksandr MelnychukApproved by: prof. Marc Juwet

BACKGROUND GDW designs and produces towbars, mainly for the aftermarket. GDW has to test each type of towbar according to the current homologation requirements. In order to reduce the failure rate of these tests, GDW wants to use finite element simulation to evaluate the internal stresses in a towbar.

This innovation project should describe in detail the recommended simulation method. This includes an easy to use method to model the geometry of the towbar, a method to model welds and bolts and the specification of acceptable stresses near welds, bolts, bends and in flat plates.

MONEY ECONOMYProduction of towbars is very expensive business without rational analyze of towbar structure.

It’s very important to find “the golden middle” between failure samples and overdesigned ones.

For this purpose we use module of Solidworks (CAD software) - Solidworks Simulation.

TIME ECONOMYSometimes in practice to make a series of towbars GDW need a lot of time, because they always, as said, look for “the golden middle”.

And sometime it’s hard to find it.So our target also was decreasing of timeconsuming.

MODELLING OF THE BOLTS, mm M6 M8 M10 M12 M14 M16, Nm 10,4 25 51 87 140 215, N 8666 15625 25500 36250 50000 67187

SPLIT LINE AND SPLIT BODY

STRESSES IN TOWBARS

CONCLUSIONS There was proposed new methods of detection and prevention of potential damage and also increasing of durability and operational reliability of test samples and finished products. One of these methods is a method that has been introduced into production and proved itself very good in dealing with reduction and distribution of stress through the use of internal stress migration. The essence of this phenomenon is creation of zones of moderately loaded next to the critical loaded areas that allows us to shift the internal stresses to the more stable areas of parts and assemblies and correspondingly to reduce the internal stresses in the critical loaded areas and reclassify them to zones of moderately loaded.

Despite the fact that time for the preparation of the study was insignificantly increased (approximately on 5 percent), the total time of the calculation of loads was significantly reduced (approximately on 50 percent), through the use of created models simulates the fixtures instead of the standard fixture elements of SolidWorks Simulation module, such as virtual bolts, nuts and washers.

FIN