Resumo em Inglês:

The collective intercity transportation by bus is currently a mean of locomotion much sought after by people. Security in accidents is a very important factor that must be taken into account in design of bus body structure, being the evaluation of passenger safety of this type of vehicle is an important subject that should be checked, because in many accidents occur disconnection between seats and fastening members causing serious passengers injury, often fatal. This work aims at evaluation the behavior of frame fixing of seats of intercity bus bodies, submitted to the frontal impact situation in a rigid wall of 100% offset, through evaluation by finite element method (FEM). This study uses a numerical model corresponding to the body structure and chassis, developed through flexible beam elements, combining with shell elements for the structure of the seats and its fastening members, with the objective of not missing the essential aspects of the problem, allowing the solution with a reduced computational time. The numerical model of bus body and seat was impacted against a rigid wall at a speed of 8.89 m/s, being its validation according to the deceleration curve established by Regulation 80. Then it was gotten the Von Mises stress in fastening members of the seat structure in bus body. It is also presented a proposal to improve the fastening of the seat structure, comparing the results of the stress gotten in the two types fastening submitted to the frontal impact.

Resumo em Inglês:

Chaotic vibration has been identified in the flexible automotive wiper blade at certain wiping speeds. This irregular vibration not only decreases the wiping efficiency, but also degrades the driving comfort. A reliable nonlinear system identification namely nonlinear auto regressive exogenous Elman neural network (NARXENN) was adopted in first stage of this survey to model the flexible dynamics of wiper blade with acquired experimental data. In controller design part, taking into account environmental and external disturbances that cause changes in the dynamic characteristics of the system demanded a robust controller to make a trade off between the worst and best scenario. An active fuzzy force controller (AFLC) supervised by multi objective genetic algorithm (MOGA) is developed to keep both interests of noise and vibration redaction of automobile wiper blade at the reasonable rise time.

Resumo em Inglês:

The flexural motions of elastically supported rectangular plates carrying moving masses and resting on variable Winkler elastic foundations is investigated in this work In order to solve the fourth order partial differential equation governing the problem, a technique based on separation of variables is used to reduce the governing fourth order partial differential equations with variable and singular coefficients to a sequence of second order ordinary differential equations. These equations are then solved using a modification of the Struble's technique and method of integral transformations. Numerical results are then presented in plotted curves. The results show that response amplitudes of the plate decrease as the value of the rotatory inertia correction factor Ro increases and for fixed value of Ro, the displacements of the elastically supported rectangular plates resting on variable elastic foundations decrease as the foundation modulus Fo increases. Also, for fixed Ro and Fo, the transverse deflections of the rectangular plates under the actions of moving masses are higher than those when only the force effects of the moving load are considered. Therefore, the moving force solution is not a safe approximation to the moving mass problem. Hence, safety is not guaranteed for a design based on the moving force solution. Furthermore, the results show that the critical speed for the moving mass problem is reached prior to that of the moving force for the elastically supported rectangular plates on Winkler elastic foundation with stiffness variation.

Resumo em Inglês:

Recently, graphene sheets have shown significant potential for environmental engineering applications such as wastewater treatment. In the present work, the posbuckling response of orthotropic single-layered graphene sheet (SLGS) is investigated in a closed-form analytical manner using the nonlocal theory of Eringen. Two opposite edges of the plate are subjected to normal stresses. The nonlocality and geometric nonlinearity are taken into consideration, which arises from the nanosized effects and mid-plane stretching, respectively. Nonlinear governing differential equations (nonlocal compatibility and equilibrium equations) are derived and presented for the aforementioned study. Galerkin method is used to solve the governing equations for simply supported boundary conditions. It is shown that the nonlocal effect plays a significant role in the nonlinear stability behavior of orthotropic nanoplates. Unlike first and second postbuckling modes, nonlocal effects decrease with the increase of lateral deflection at higher postbuckling modes. It is also observed that the nonlocality and nonlinearity is more pronounced for higher postbuckling modes.

Resumo em Inglês:

This paper aims to conduct a comparative study on four different models of effective field and effective medium for modeling propagation of plane elastic waves through the composites containing spherical particles with random distribution. Effective elastic properties along with the normalized phase velocity and attenuation of the average wave was numerically evaluated by the models. The plane incident wave was considered longitudinal to get the results. The numerical analyses were performed on four types of composites in the range of low to intermediate frequency and different volume fractions. Judgment about this comparative study is done based on physical and theoretical concepts in the wave propagation phenomenon. The obtained results provide a good viewpoint in using different models for studying propagation of the plane elastic waves in various particulate composites.

Resumo em Inglês:

For the first time, the bending analysis of a double curved sandwich panel was presented which was subjected to point load, uniform distributed load on a patch, and harmonic distributed loads and was based on a new improved higher order sandwich panel theory. Since the cross-sectional warping was accurately modeled by this theory, it did not require any shear correction factor. Also, the present analysis incorporated trapezoidal shape factor (the 1+z/R terms) of a curved panel element. Geometry was used for the consideration of different radii curvatures of the face sheets, while the core was unique. Unlike most of other reference works, the core can have non-uniform thickness. The governing equations were derived by the principle of minimum potential energy. The effects of types of boundary conditions, types of applied loads, core to panel, and radii curvatures ratios on the bending response were also studied.

Resumo em Inglês:

This paper studies the crashworthiness characteristics of a fuselage section and its improvement. A full-scale three-dimensional finite element model of the fuselage section is developed using a nonlinear finite element code, PAM-CRASH. The simulation is implemented to determine the structural deformation and impact response in terms of peak loads and acceleration peaks at the floor-level, deformation mode, energy absorption, and structural integrity, and then to assess the crashworthiness of the fuselage section. By partitioning the total energy dissipated, it is shown that the frames and the supports of the cargo floor play important roles in the process of energy dissipation. Based on the results, an effective approach to improve the crashworthiness of the fuselage section is presented. The paper also provides an in-depth analysis in the deformation mechanism of the fuselage section under a vertical crash, which will be helpful to effectively prevent the cabin floor from heavily damage and maintain the integrity of the fuselage section.

Resumo em Inglês:

An accurate coupled field piezoelectric beam finite element formulation is presented. The formulation is based on First-order Shear Deformation Theory (FSDT) with layerwise electric potential. An appropriate through-thickness electric potential distribution is derived using electrostatic equilibrium equations, unlike conventional FSDT based formulations which use assumed independent layerwise linear potential distribution. The derived quadratic potential consists of a coupled term which takes care of induced potential and the associated change in stiffness, without bringing in any additional electrical degrees of freedom. It is shown that the effects of induced potential are significant when piezoelectric material dominates the structure configuration. The accurate results as predicted by a refined 2D simulation are achieved with only single layer modeling of piezolayer by present formulation. It is shown that the conventional formulations require sublayers in modeling, to reproduce the results of similar accuracy. Sublayers add additional degrees of freedom in the conventional formulations and hence increase computational cost. The accuracy of the present formulation has been verified by comparing results obtained from numerical simulation of test problems with those obtained by conventional formulations with sublayers and ANSYS 2D simulations.

Resumo em Inglês:

An analytical model is developed to examine a low impulsive projectile impact on a fully clamped sandwich beams by considering the coupled responses of the core and the face sheets. Firstly, based on the dynamic properties of foam cores, the sandwich beam is modeled as two rigid perfectly-plastic beams connected by rigid perfectly-plastic springs. Different from the previous sandwich beam model, the transverse compression and bending effects of the foam core are considered in the whole deformation process. Based on this model, different coupling mechanism of sandwich beams are constructed so that an analytical solution considering small deformation is derived. The coupled dynamic responses of sandwich beams with different core strengths are investigated. The results indicate that this model improves the prediction accuracy of the responses of the sandwich beams, and is available for the situation when the sandwich beam undergoes moderate global deformation.

Resumo em Inglês:

In this paper a consistent theory is developed for size-dependent thermoelasticity in heterogeneous anisotropic solids. This theory shows that the temperature change can create not only thermal strains, but also thermal mean curvatures in the solids. This formulation is based on the consistent size-dependent continuum mechanics in which the couple-stress tensor is skew-symmetric. Here by including scale-dependent measures in the energy and entropy equations, the general expressions for force- and couple-stresses, as well as entropy density, are obtained. Next, for the linear material the constitutive relations and governing coupled size-dependent thermoelasticity equations are developed. For linear material, one can see that the thermal properties are characterized by the classical symmetric thermal expansion tensor and the new size-dependent skew-symmetric thermal flexion tensor. Thus, for the most general anisotropic case, there are nine independent thermoelastic constants. Interestingly, for isotropic and cubic materials the thermal flexion tensor vanishes, which shows there is no thermal mean curvature