An Integrating Finite Element Method and Multi-body Simulation for Drive Systems Analysis

Abstract

Abstract. Roller chain and sprockets are an important component of the drive system in production lines of any industries. Many problems which concerned for damage of roller chain and sprockets would break down the producing process. To understand every failure behavior might be used a long time of experience in production lines. Furthermore, some phenomena of failure cases for roller chain and sprockets were unpredictable by an analytic method. This research aimed to propose installed cases of the roller chain and sprocket by the modeling technique. The new method for simulation of drive system was employed to analyze roller chain and a sprocket. The finite element method was used to simulate the behavior of parts that might be damaged by integrating with the multi-body system of rigid parts in the driving system. The integrating simulation would explain any installed cases of roller chain and a sprocket distinctively. Particularly, simulation results in many forms the roller chain which wrapped a sprocket would be good examples for an engineering study and design of drive system in a further work.

A walking roller chain

“…In them, space partitioning or sorting along an axis is used to discard the majority of pairs of bodies that need to be checked. 7 A collision candidate is any pair of bodies for which we suspect that they may be colliding. 8 In the majority of collisions, the middle non-circular part of a chain link can be disregarded (Fig.…”

“…For the broad phase collision detection 6 we used the sweep and prune algorithm, the details of which can be found in reference [16]. After finding a collision candidate, 7 we need to test whether and where the bodies intersect and determine the normaln and tangentialt unit vectors if they do. Given that this is simplest to do for circles, we model the chain links as two circles positioned at the joints 8 and the sprocket as a circle with a large friction coefficient and a small restitution coefficient.…”

“…Previous studies of roller chains have predominantly investigated the mechanics of a chain within a chain drive system, its power transmission efficiency, longevity, durability and many other topics of practical significance [1][2][3][4]. Recently, successful attempts at modelling and simulating roller chains using multibody dynamics 2 have been developed [5][6][7], although still limited to chain drive motion. Currently there is no analysis of the motion of a free roller chain, rapidly spinning or otherwise, available in the literature.…”

Fatigue Strength Analysis and Fatigue Damage Evaluation of Roller Chain

“…The fatigue experiment 2 of 15 was conducted for the roller chain as shown in Figure 1 under the tensile state [9,10]. Focusing on the kinematics and dynamics study of the combination of chain and sprocket, the vibration and impact load of the roller chain were studied without analysis of the pin and bush [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29]. In this way, no studies are available for the strength of each component in an assembled roller chain and under operation (press-fitting state, tensile state, sprocket-engaging state) and these combinations on the basis of stress analysis.…”