Finite element simulation of the static characteristics of a vehicle rubber mount

Abstract

The static and dynamic characteristics of the rubber mounts for vibration isolation in automotive powertrains and other dynamic systems should be predicted during their design and development stage. In this paper, the static characteristic simulation of a rubber mount is performed using the finite element method. The modelling and simulation methods for a large deformation rubber spring represented by axisymmetric, quarter-symmetric and three-dimensional finite element models are investigated by using finite element analysis software PATRAN for meshing and ABAQUS and ADINA for computations. The predicted vertical static elastic characteristics of the rubber spring agree well with the experimental results. The static strain-stress analysis of the rubber part shows that the von Mises stress can be adopted as a stress measure for the rubber material. Moreover, the modelling methods for the large deformation rubber mount are investigated with numerical tests of elastic characteristics. The hybrid elements with full integration and lower-order interpolation show less distortion and are suitable for large deformation simulation computations. The research results will help engineers and researchers to perform engineering design and analysis of rubber mounts and other vibration reduction rubber components using the finite element simulation method.