A Contribution to Predict the Structural Dynamics of Mounted Short Glass Fiber Reinforced Thermoplastic Components

Abstract

At the state of art, current simulative methods modelling joint properties as fixed interaction between components or concentrate on the characterization of the joint stiffness and damping of coupled metallic structures. In the current work, the developed thin layer interaction (TLI) method was applied to study the influence of the joint stiffness and damping of plastic components coupled with metallic structures. The joint stiffness and damping of different coupled metallic-plastic joint structures was characterized experimentally and was used to fill the reduced transverse shear stiffness and damping tensors of the numerical TLI model. The TLI model was used to determine the structural dynamics behavior of a short glass fiber reinforced plastic engine bracket mounted to a steel block. The comparison of experimental and simulative results shows a better correlation under the usage of the TLI model compared to a fixed modeled joint behavior. As result, the TLI model allows a better prediction of the structural dynamics of coupled plastic components. Further researches focus on the accurate experimental estimation of the boundary conditions regarding excitation and mounting of the plastic components. Thus, a more realistic modelling of the numerical joint boundary conditions is possible for an improved simulation of the structural dynamics of plastic components.

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