Finite Element Analysis And Robust Design On Laminated Rubber Spring Of Heavy Truck

With the fast development of heavy truck industry in our country, the suspension which influences the safety, comfort and service life of heavy truck becomes more and more important. In order to obtain better performance on vibration reduction and vibration isolation, new types of suspension have been created and applied on heavy trucks, and rubber spring suspension has drawn more and more attentions for its light heavy, maintenance free and excellent suspension performance. According to the requirements of users, the factories need to make adjustments about the rubber spring which is the key part of a rubber spring suspension. However, the traditional design methods can’t satisfy this goal. Virtual prototype technology provides an useful and efficient way to solve this problem. In the process of using finite element method to design rubber spring, there are still some difficulties which need to be conquered including building rubber model quickly, the comparative of different rubber models, and the determination of materials’parameters and the application of robust design on rubber spring.Based on the detailed introduction of the linear rubber constitutive model and the hyperplastic rubber constitutive model, the traditionally experimental method to define the material’s parameters have been discussed, and a quicker method which is based on hardness of material has been introduced.The constitutive models of linear rubber model and Mooney-Rivlin constitutive model have been built separately in the finite element analysis by using the FEA software of ANSYS. Using the way of obtain material parameters by hardness, the accuracy of simulation of these two kinds of constitutive models have been compared. With the comparison of the existed experimental parameters, the more accurate constitutive model could be chosen from the two kinds of models. Therefore, the accurate model of laminated rubber spring is built, and the further study on the material parameter of this model is carried out. When the values of C0 1 /C1 0 vary, different load-displacement curves can be obtained by running the computations of a series of laminated rubber spring models with different material parameters. Through the error analysis between the load-displacement curves from computation with the curve from experiment, the proper c10 and c01 are decided. Finally, the modeling of accurate laminated rubber spring is established. With the sensitivity analysis of structural design parameters of laminated rubber spring including the number of rubber layer N, the inclination angleαand the diameter of rubber layer D, the control factors and the ranges of their value are identified. Aimed at the target vertical stiffness curve, the robust design method is applied on the process of optimization of the laminated rubber spring, and the design project which can achieve the closest stiffness curve is selected.The methods of building accurate laminated rubber spring and robust design methods are very valuable which are almost could be used in all rubber parts’modeling and design. Meanwhile, the methods in this article could overcome the flaw of the shortage of experimental conditions and have strong operability. Therefore, it is significant in engineering and could provide a prototype for the following research on rubber parts.