Design Of Engine Components With Thermoresistant Composite Material

Design Of Engine Components With Thermoresistant Composite Material The twenty-first century was characterized by an increasing demand in terms of technology progress, from the informatic field to the automotive one. Regarding the automotive field, in the last years global pollution became more and more important and, with this in mind the engine efficiency and the fuel saving have concentrated on themselves the efforts of the fabricants. The project is based on the usage of composite materials in the automotive field. In order to reach this goal, FEM (Finite Element Method) analyzes have been performed on different engine components. In particular, this project focus on the wrist pin, between the piston and the connecting rod. A parallel study was made on the connecting rod, following the same physical model. The original geometry of the components comes from a FIAT Fire 1.4 8V engine. The new components have been redesigned coherently with the composite material properties in order to be produced and to resist to the stress due to combustion. The aim of the new design is to produce the components with the actual technologies. The use of composite materials allows to reduce considerably the weight of the components and therefore the inertial forces on the engine. However, the aim of this project is not only to reduce weight, but also to design an optimal fibers orientation. In this way is possible to avoid discharged portion of material inside the component. To perform the FEM analysis, different programs have been used. First, the geometry of the pin was drawn on Solidworks. Then the pin was meshed with Altair Hypermesh. The simulation was performed with the solver Altair Optistruct. Finally, results were analyzed with the post-processing software Altair Hyperview. During the preparation of the model, a new feature of Hypermesh was used. It is the PCOMPLS property, a particular property able to simulate solid composite layers. Usually, composite materials are analyzed with the Laminate Tool in Hypermesh. This tool is able to generate only shell elements, so surface elements, not suitable for this project. The tool was used as first attempt for the analysis, then PCOMPLS property was used. The characteristic of this property will be discussed later, as well as the laminate tool model preparation. In order to converge the results of Optistruct, some modifications have been performed on the model, and will be discussed in the Model chapter. The divergence is due to the non-linearity of the analysis, due in turn to the introduction of contact surfaces between the different parts.