Technical Papers and Presentations

Anti-roll bar or stabilizer bar is a critical component for vehicle’s roll stiffness. This plays a major role in cornering and overall vehicle dynamics. Various methods can be used to calculate stiffness of roll bar at design stage. A simple formula-based method is used calculate the stiffness of the anti-roll bar from the geometric parameters. The limitation of this method is that it cannot accommodate complex geometries with multiple bends. CAE simulations can be performed to find the stiffness of complex geometries, but it is time consuming. CAE simulation also need expert knowledge to define boundary conditions as well as we can apply the method only after creating the design in CAD. An intermediate method is suitable for concept design stage which can simulate complex geometry and can be used by general user without CAE expertise. A new application is developed in COMSOL to front load the existing CAE method. The objective of this COMSOL Multiphysics® application is to compute the stiffness of Stabilizer Bars under different load cases with and without bushing. The application is parametric hence no cad model is required to build the geometry and it can accommodate 15 bends. No Finite Element Analysis knowledge is required to run the application, since the Meshing, loadcase setup and other steps are automated inside COMSOL Multiphysics® app.

The Structural Mechanics module was used to build the application. The geometry is dynamically created based on the input selection by the user. Multiple loadcases have been configured which can be chosen by the designer. Along with the deflection and stiffness is calculated as per required standards, which can help optimize the anti-roll bar design. The COMSOL Multiphysics® results were correlated with analysis on 3D-CAD design on a Nastran solver. The model is packaged as an app using the COMSOL Multiphysics® app builder. Designers can create iterate over different configurations and optimize the design for better performance and lower weights This helps designer to focus on the input design without getting into nitty gritty of the model design and solver configuration. The app is deployed on MathApps - Mahindra’s enterprise level design calculator portal is. The app is supported in the backend by COMSOL Server^TM and this makes it to convenient for multiple users to use the same application across Mahindra.