The Calculation And Test Of Fatigue Life For The Axle Housing Of Automotive Drive Axle

With the rapid development of automobile industry, the performance of motor vehicles have become increasingly demanding. Designing drive axle housing rationally is also one of the important measures to improve the comfort and reliability of the automobile .The Drive Bridge shell called for adequate stiffness and strength, less quality, and sufficient fatigue life time. The process of trial production and the performance of test bench of the axle housing in order to modify the design will waste much time and labor force. ANSYS10.0 is one of the finite element software to simulate and analyze the performance of the static strength, stiffness, and fatigue strength tests bench of the axle housing. In the process of designing the Bridge Shell, using ANSYS10.0 can reduce the processes of repeated trial production, testing, modification, and greatly improve the production efficiency of the factories.The paper introduces design principles and the construction of equipment .The equipment is controlled by the electric and liquid servo system. According to the national standard, the equipment is to test the performance of axle housing of automotive drive axle which is vertically bended. At the same time, the 3D model of the drive axle housing G5Q4 was established with the software CATIAV 5 .Based on this model, the axle housing of automotive drive axle could be simulated in computer under the circumstances of ANSYS 10.0. It includes the analysis of static strength, stiffness; fatigue strength of the axle housing which is vertically bended .The results of the upper two methods was compared and analyzed. If the results are similar, it can verify that the simulation is feasible. The above two methods applied to the different stages when designing and producing a axle housing of automotive drive axle could greatly enhance the efficiency of the work and the reliability of the products.This paper introduced the traditional theoretical fatigue strength calculation of the dangerous point of the Bridge shell to us simultaneously. From the calculation we can get that the method presented in this paper is reasonable and effective. At the last time, it analyzes the causes of fatigue damage on the bridge shell and puts forward the measures for improvement to us.