Research on crack Initiation mechanisms of rear non-driving axle of a passenger car during accelerated life testing in proving ground
摘要
To investigate the fracture crack in the rear non-driving axle (RNDA) of a certain passenger car during accelerated life testing, a comparison test analysis was conducted on this car after replacing its new axle and on a comparative car, and the material properties of the target car RNDA were thoroughly tested. The fatigue damage of the RNDA was calculated based on Morrow’s model and Miner’s damage rule. The frequency sweeping was performed on the vehicle bodies and RNDAs of both cars to establish the correlation between the vibration frequency of RNDA and the excitation frequency of proving ground (PG). The comparison testing and material analysis results show that the chemical element content and metallographic microstructure of the target car RNDAs meet the technical standards, and no composition segregation or microstructure defects were found. The maximum Brinell hardness is 252HBW, which fails to meet the technical requirements. The accumulated damage of the target car RNDA was primarily concentrated on the washboard road, at a test speed of 65 km/h, the excitation frequency of forced vibration caused by the washboard road was 24.1 Hz, which coincides with the natural frequency of the first-order bending mode of the target car RNDA. The significantly increased stress amplitude directly accelerated crack initiation. The modal damping ratio of the target car RNDA is 18.51 %, excessive damping ratio increased the vibration period of the RNDA, and the axle body continuously was subjected to high amplitude cyclic stress in resonance state, exacerbating crack propagation.