Design of engine components with composite material

Design of engine components with composite material In the last decades, the automotive sector has experienced great progress in reached velocity, comfort or security. These new conditions, together with a stricter legislation about the global pollution, lead to new requirements that the fabricants must face in the market. One of the fields where the companies are spending their effort and time is the engine efficiency and fuel economy. In this optimization process, FEM (Finite Element Method) is the most used tool, being the weight component reduction one of the most important aspect to decrease the fuel consumption. In this project, a new configuration for the connecting rod has been analysed in terms of material stress and weight reduction. This study was performed in parallel with one about the wrist pin, following the same considerations in FEM tuning and physical simplified model. Due to the material characteristics, the thermal stress wasn’t considered. Focusing on the innovation desire, the component has been designed in composite material, in particular carbon fibre. It is the best material to obtain a significant weight reduction. However, the aim of this study was also to obtain a better stress distribution inside the component. For this reason, it was designed a new way to impose the preload to the cap, avoiding the classical bolts. The main dimensions of the rod were taken from the Fiat Fire 1.4 8V engine, while the final geometry considered both the space inside the engine and the production process. To perform this FEM study, different programs have been used. First, the geometry was drawn using Solidworks of Dassault Systemes and then it has been reduced in forms of surfaces, has been cleaned, prepared and meshed with the software HyperMesh of Altair. The simulations were performed with the solver Optistruct. Finally, the results have been analysed using HyperView.