No abstract

The requirements for mechanical reliability of automotive crankshafts are continuously increasing, thus pushing the demand for an optimized processing. Nonetheless, the manufacturing‐induced residual stresses at critical sites for fatigue enhancement are not clarified in the state‐of‐the‐art on the topic. In particular, there is a lack of information on the effect of final manufacturing stages to improve the component life endurance, such as deep rolling, in the overall stress state while the component is under operational loads. This study deepens the validation of a finite element deep rolling model under development with the aid of an in‐house developed crankshaft resonance fatigue test rig. The stress state obtained from the deep rolling simulation was input as a predefined stress field for the simulation of operational conditions experimented at the test rig. Test results produced cracks at the fillet radii of the cast iron crankshafts as anticipated. Overlapping the fractography with the simulation's final stress field yielded interesting correlation with the crack morphology. This contributed with a strong indication of the model correctness. Moreover, it can be further implemented to indicate whether the process parameters such as roller force and angle are fully optimized for each particular crankshaft application.

Advancements seeking structural components' strength and weight reduction necessarily pass through fatigue testing. Understanding failure phenomena and crack evolution is a way of methodologically achieving such a goal. An own-designed resonant fatigue test rig was used to study the behavior of three distinctly manufactured crankshaft batches. A control system and a resonant frequency estimator were developed to follow the overall stiffness reduction with crack advancement. The control algorithm followed the frequency decay to compensate for the input load. The control strategies were validated by finding the system's natural frequency at the beginning of the test and maintaining a constant nominal load. Fractographies made with failed and non-failed specimens revealed the connection between the expected physical results and the natural frequency shift evolution. The implemented logic enables crack advancement tracking and failure determination. The developments here can be overflown to different resonance fatigue systems to characterize their endurance performance.