Material parameter study for aheavy-vehicle exhaust manifoldusing the finite element method : to increase component lifetime and decrease its environmental impact

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