Fatigue life prediction and verification of rubber to metal bonded springs

Over many years of design and application experience, our products have fulfilled the customers required service life with very few fatigue failure problems. Recently an integrated fatigue evaluation programme has been carried out at the company aiming at improving the design of our anti-vibration component. This programme will also enable the FE simulation more reliable and directly associated to the industrial applications. Continuum mechanics (total life) approach has been used to characterise the fatigue life in terms of the cyclic stress range (S-N curve). It is suggested that an effective stress σ f can be used as a parameter (as a function of three principal stresses) to evaluate fatigue failure based on the uniaxial fatigue test. The initial verification of this approach has been carried out on one of our products (Metacone mountings). The results have shown a good agreement between the uniaxial fatigue test and the real component test.