Structure Design And Fatigue Life Study Of Rubber Bushing For Commercial Vehicle Thrust Rod

The working conditions of heavy commercial vehicle is too hard to cause the fatigue failure of the rubber bushing for commercial vehicle thrust rod.Therefore it put forward high demand on its structure design.But now the design only considers the longitudinal reciprocating motion of rubber bushing,but lack of coaxial torsional motion by wheel hop.The fatigue life prediction of rubber bushing is only on the stage of uniaxial load fatigue test,and there is no software to predict the fatigue life based on finite element analysis,And there are few studies on the fatigue life prediction under Multi-axial Loading.In this paper,the finite element simulation software and MATLAB are used to study the structural design and fatigue life of the rubber bushing for thrust rod.The main content of this paper is divided into the following four parts.The first part introduces the function and movement characteristics of thrust rod rubber bushing,then introduces its structure evolution,as well as areas of current research domestic and overseas.The second part analyses the advantages and limitations of various rubber fatigue life theory,then derive the formula of fatigue life calculation for rubber,finally the fatigue life calculation program is compiled based on the MATLAB software platform.The third part gets thrust rod loading through theoretical calculation,and then obtained super elastic rubber material model through experiments,and then analyzes thrust rod by finite element simulation,and the correctness of the model was verified by modal test and static stiffness test.In the fourth part,the finite element simulations of the uniaxial working condition of the most used rubber ball hinge structures of the thrust rod are carried out,and their fatigue lives under the uniaxial condition are predicted by the life calculation program based on the MATLAB software.Then the uniaxial fatigue tests of the thrust rod of the above structures are carried out.The tests result verifies the correctness of the calculation program.Secondly,the finite element simulation and life calculation of the above-mentioned structures are carried out,and the results are compared with the results obtained by uniaxial conditions to quantify the effect of coaxial torsional motion on the fatigue life of rubber ball joints.Finally,the improvement scheme of rubber ball hinge structure is put forward.The finite element simulation and life calculation results show that the fatigue life of rubber has improved greatly.The design idea of this paper can provide a new idea for the structural development of rubber ball hinge.The fatigue life calculation program proposed in this paper can be used as another important method to predict fatigue life.