Verification and Validation of Static Structural and Explicit Dynamic Simulations Respectively for Plastic Products with Especial Care for Automotive Application

Nowadays, the finite element analyses provide beneficial support in many fields of engineering by means of their cost, time and capacity saving characteristics. During the analyses, the one of the key elements is the correctly defined material properties. This is especially true for the plastics due to their orthotropic and nonlinear material properties as plasticity, relaxation or creep for example. Additionally, the applications of the plastics are widely spread in the automotive engineering beside the other sectors of the industry. Hence, the main goal of the present research is to verify static structural and to validate impact dynamic simulation results by the available material data and actually performed measurement results respectively. Tensile test and creep simulations were carried out in Ansys Workbench software for comparing the static structural simulation results with the available material data given by the material manufacturer in case of the used test samples, boundary conditions and material properties. Following the verification, the material models were applied for a specimen and for a model of an existing product in order to complete validation of the explicit dynamic simulation’s results. Real vertical hammer tests were set up and performed for this purpose and the same procedure was simulated also in order to be able to compare the results and drawn conclusions about the accuracy of the calculation method.