The thesis originates from a need to meet stricter environmental regulations for Scania, to reduce fuel consumption and emission from heavy-vehicles. Scania aims to fulfil these requirements by increasing combustion pressure and temperature. These conditions are tougher for the engine components and they shorten their lifetime. This thesis aims to improve Scania’s ability to increase the lifetime of a heavy-vehicle exhaust manifold, an engine component that collects exhaust from several engine cylinders into one pipe. This was done by conducting a material comparison and a parameter study, both used the FEM software Abaqus CAE. The material comparison consisted of three ferritic and austenitic ductile cast irons (SiMo51, SiMo1000 and Ni-resist) subjected to thermal stress. Their max stress was compared for two thermo-mechanical fatigue cases, out-of-phase and in-phase. A parameter study was also conducted to clarify the influence of thermal conductivity, thermalexpansion, Young’s modulus and yield strength on max stress for OP and IP in the exhaust manifold. The FEM simulation results from the parameter study were used to create functions that can be used to decide how to treat/process a material to minimise the stress in the exhaust manifold. They can also be used in material selection to choose a material that minimises stress. The research questions and their shortened answers can be seen below. 1. Which of SiMo51, SiMo1000 and Ni-resist produces the lowest tensile stresses? ForOP, SiMo1000 produced a slightly lower max principal stress than SiMo51. For IP, Ni-resistproduced the lowest max principal stress by a large margin. 2. How do different material properties affect the maximum stress during operation of thegiven component? Thermal conductivity has a decreasing relation to max stress. Thermalexpansion and Young’s modulus have a similar relation to max stress, stress increases forboth properties as they increase. A decreased yield strength decreases the max stress forstresses above the yield limit but has no effect on stress below it. 3. How should an objective function to minimise max stress in the component with regard to material properties be expressed? functions of OP and IP can be seen in the actual abstract.

No description available.

Finite element simulation of thermoplastic components is gaining importance as the companies aim to avoid overdesign of the components. Cost of the component can be minimized by using an adequate amount of material for its application. Life of the component, in a particular application, can be predicted as early as during its design phase with the help of computer simulations. To achieve reliable simulation results, an accurate material model which can predict the material behaviour is vital. Most material models consist of a number of material parameters that needs to be fed into them. These material parameters can be identified with the inputs from physical tests. The accuracy of the data extracted from the physical tests, however, remains the base for the aforementioned process. The report deals with the implementation of optical measurement technique such as Digital Image Correlation (DIC) in contrast with the conventional extensometers. A tensile test is conducted on a glass fibre reinforced thermoplastic specimen, according to ISO 527-2/1A, to extract the experimental data with the help of DIC technique. The material behavior is reproduced within a finite element analysis software package LS-DYNA, with the combination of elastoplastic model called *MAT_024 and stress state dependent damage and failure model called GISSMO. The tensile test is performed under quasi-static condition to rule out the strain rate dependency of the thermoplastic material. The mesh sensitivity of the damage model is taken into account with the element size regularization. The thesis concerns setting up a routine for material parameter identification of thermoplastics by full-field calibration (FFC) approach. Also, comparison of the strain field in the specimen, obtained through the newly set up routine against the regular non-FFC i.e. extensometer measurement routine. The major objective being, through the comparisons, a qualitative assessment of the two routines in terms of calibration time vs. gain in simulation accuracy. Material models obtained through both the routines are implemented in three-point and four-point bending simulations. The predicted material behaviors are evaluated against experimental tests.

The constantly tightening emission regulations demand the engines to be moreefficient, to get more power out of smaller engines. Higher engine loads andcomponent temperatures are causing more stresses to engine components. Therefore,a company that produces engines wanted to study if it would be possible to increasethe capabilities of the components by optimising the used material. In this final project work, a cylinder head will be studied. The cylinder heads for theengines are made of ductile cast iron. The limits of that material are near safety limits,and therefore a better material is needed. In this work are some previous studiesanalysed and tried to find how to optimise the used material. The optimised materialshould have better thermal conductivity properties combined with sufficient strengthproperties. Previous studies were analysed to gather knowledge of the elements that affect thematerial parameters. Those studies showed that copper, silicon, pearlite fraction, andthe use of chills are the elements to be optimised. Silicon and pearlite fraction waschosen as optimisation parameters because of their effect on the thermal conductivityand strength properties. Copper was chosen as an optimisation variable due to its effecton the pearlite formation. Chills were used to affect the cooling rate and thereby thepearlite formation. The work was made using MAGMASOFT™ simulation software to simulate cylinderhead casting. The simulated cylinder head was divided into 4 parts for the simulations.For those sections were then set targets for pearlite fraction according to previousstudies. The silicon content was kept constant in the simulation, based on the studiespresented in this work. Copper content was simulated with variations from 0 to 0.7weight-%, and chill heights were simulated from 20 to 60 mm and without chills. After simulating the different variables, the results were analysed. Then the selectedcasting simulation result was mapped to finite element simulation mesh to include thelocal material parameters to finite element simulation. With the finite elementsimulation, the estimated lifetime of the component was simulated. By analysing the casting simulation results, an optimal combination was found. Theoptimal material parameters for a cylinder head casting would be copper 0.5weight-%, silicon 1.9 weight-% and chills thicker than 40 mm on the flame plate. Theoptimised material gives more possibilities to develop engines even further when thecomponent demands are growing.

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Estimating parameters is the problem of finding their values from measurements and modelling. Parameters describe properties of a system; material, for instance, are defined by mechanical, electrical, and chemical parameters. Fisher information is an information measure, giving information about how changes in the parameter effect the estimation. The Fisher information includes the physical model of the problem and the statistical model of noise. The Cramér-Rao bound is the inverse of the Fisher information and gives the best possible variance for any unbiased estimator. This thesis considers aspects of sensitivity analysis in two applied material parameter estimation problems. Sensitivity analysis with the Fisher information and the Cramér-Rao bound is used as a tool for evaluation of measurement feasibilities, comparison of measurement set-ups, and as a quantitative measure of the trade-off between accuracy and resolution in inverse imaging. The first application is with estimation of the wood grain angle parameter in trees and logs. The grain angle is the angle between the direction of the wood fibres and the direction of growth; a large grain angle strongly correlates to twist in sawn timber. In the thesis, measurements with microwaves are argued as a fast and robust measurement technique and electromagnetic modelling is applied, exploiting the anisotropic properties of wood. Both two-dimensional and three-dimensional modelling is considered. Mathematical modelling is essential, lowering the complexity and speeding up the computations. According to a sensitivity analysis with the Cramér-Rao bound, estimation of the wood grain angle with microwaves is feasible. The second application is electrical impedance tomography, where the conductivity of an object is estimated from surface measurements. Electrical impedance tomography has applications in, for example, medical imaging, geological surveillance, and wood evaluation. Different configurations and noise models are evaluated with sensitivity analysis for a two-dimensional electrical impedance tomography problem. The relation between the accuracy and resolution is also analysed using the Fisher information. To conclude, sensitivity analysis is employed in this thesis, as a method to enhance material parameter estimation. The sensitivity analysis methods are general and applicable also on other parameter estimation problems. / Estimering av parametrar är att finna deras värde utifrån mätningar och modellering. Parametrar beskriver egenskaper hos system och till exempel material kan definieras med mekaniska, elektriska och kemiska parametrar. Fisherinformation är ett informationsmått som ger information om hur ändringar i en parameter påverkar estimeringen. Fisherinformationen ges av en fysikalisk modell av problemet och en statistisk modell av mätbruset. Cramér-Rao-gränsen är inversen av Fisherinformationen och ger den bästa möjliga variansen för alla väntevärdesriktiga estimatorer.Den här avhandlingen behandlar aspekter av känslighetsanalys i två tillämpade estimeringsproblem för materialparametrar. Känslighetsanalys med Fisherinformation och Cramér-Rao-gränsen används som ett redskap för utvärdering av möjligheten att mäta och för jämförelser av mätuppställningar, samt som ett kvantitativt mått på avvägningen mellan noggrannhet och upplösning för inversa bilder. Den första tillämpningen är estimering av fibervinkeln hos träd och stockar. Fibervinkeln är vinkeln mellan växtriktningen och riktningen hos träfibern och en stor fibervinkel är relaterad till problem med formstabilitet i färdiga brädor. Mikrovågsmätningar av fibervinkeln presenteras som en snabb och robust mätteknik. I avhandlingen beskrivs två- och tredimensionella elektromagnetiska modeller som utnyttjar anisotropin hos trä. Eftersom matematisk modellering minskar komplexiteten och beräkningstiden är det en viktig del i estimeringen. Enligt känslighetsanalys med Cramér-Rao-gränsen är estimering av fibervinkeln hos trä möjlig. Den andra tillämpningen är elektrisk impedanstomografi, där ledningsförmågan hos objekt bestäms genom mätningar på ytan. Elektrisk impedanstomografi har tillämpningar inom till exempel medicinska bilder, geologisk övervakning och trämätningar. Olika mätkonfigurationer och brusmodeller utvärderas med känslighetsanalys för ett tvådimensionellt exempel på elektrisk impedanstomografi. Relationen mellan noggrannhet och upplösning analyseras med Fisher information. För att sammanfatta beskrivs känslighetsanalys som en metod för att förbättra estimeringen av materialparametrar. Metoderna för känslighetsanalys är generella och kan tillämpas också på andra estimeringsproblem för parametrar.

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Electromagnetic welding is an innovative, high-speed technology to manufacture mixed material joints. In this dissertation, an experimental-numerical method is presented to identify robust process windows of aluminum-copper and aluminum-steel compounds. The microstructural characteristics of these joints were investigated in detail. Moreover, an evaluation of the joint quality is presented and different numerical models were introduced for the simulation of macroscopic and microscopic effects. To improve the accuracy of the simulations, the strain rate sensitivity of the materials must be considered. For this purpose a high-speed setup for the identification of relevant viscoplastic material parameters, comprising an inverse evaluation strategy, was developed.