Development of Analysis Method and Experimental Equipment for Fatigue Durability of Automotive Wire Harness System

Abstract

In this study, the methodology for the fatigue life prediction using finite element method(FEM) in wire, bundle and assembly level of the wire harness system and the development of the fatigue life test machine for the numerical analysis are investigated. To obtain stress-life(S-N) histories of the componential wires of the system, five kinds of wires are prepared and applied to the repeated bending motion using developed fatigue life test equipment. Equivalent model of the wire from the rule of mixtures theory is used for the material modeling of sheath and wire core combination. Contact conditions among the wires, taping conditions are established through the bundle level test and numerical bundle analysis. Wire and bundle level results are adopted for the assembly level analysis. For the assembly level analysis, real wire harness system including bundle and grommet is numerically modeled and applied contact condition between wires with real opening motion. The fatigue life more than 700,000 cycles of the assembly is obtained from the FEM, and it is confirmed that the result has good agreement with the experimental result.