Every year, the Society of Plastics Engineers picks a particular application to honor in its Hall of Fame. It’s always fun to see what they picked. One of the nominees this year is the use of thermoplastic elastomer in constant-velocity joint (CVJ) boot applications, which was first used 25 years ago by General Motors’ Saginaw Steering Division.
When auto OEMs started designing front-wheel drive vehicles in the 1970s to improve fuel economy, engineers shifted from rubber to TPE for boots to boost flex fatigue and contaminant resistance. “Thermoplastic elastomers were a huge step change - all of the sudden the durability was more than doubled so consumers no longer had to deal with boot failure, engineers could now design smaller, more compact, less costly boots, and automakers could worry less about service-life limitations,” says Eric Randa, DuPont Automotive chassis segment manager.
The nomination for Hytrel elastomer states that more than 1 billion boots have been in service without material failure - each surviving 150,000 miles of continuous flexing, pelting and thermal cycling.
A new process for laser-welding large-scale, steel-aluminum foam sandwich structures for lightweighting ships, which eliminates intermetallic phase, has been demonstrated.
A major advance in repairing composite structures combining robots and lasers bodes well for commercial aircraft such as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and Airbus A350XWB, which contain composites in large proportions of their structures.
Against a backdrop of mounting product complexity and a need to keep a lid on development costs, companies are recognizing a need to make simulation a more integral part of the design process. In response, vendors in the CAD world are building out CAE functionality as part of their CAD suites while simulation vendors are building tighter integrations to leading CAD tools. Keith Meintjes, Ph.D., Practice Manager, Simulation and Analysis at CIMdata, Inc., joins Design News CAD Editor Beth Stackpole in this radio program to explore the new face of integrated CAD and CAE, how companies are benefitting from this tighter partnership between platforms, and how integrating CAE earlier in the development cycle pays off in optimized product designs.
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