This paper investigates the operation of an automotive poly-rib serpentine belt system. A three-dimensional dynamic finite element model, consisting of a driver pulley, a driven pulley, and a complete five-rib V-ribbed belt, was created. Belt construction accounts for three different elastomeric compounds and a single layer of reinforcing cords. Rubber was considered incompressible hyperelastic material, and cord was considered linear elastic material. The material model accounting for thermal strains and temperature-dependent properties of the rubber solids was implemented in ABAQUS∕EXPLICIT code for the simulation. A tangential shear angle and an axial shear angle were defined to quantify shear deformations. The shear angles were found to be closely related to velocity variation along contact arc and the imbalanced contact stress distribution on different sides of the same rib and on different ribs. The temperature effect on shear deformation, tension and velocity variation, and contact stress distribution was investigated and shown in comparison to the results for the same system operating at room temperature.
A B S T R A C T A known factor that limits the performance of automotive front-end accessory serpentine belt drive is cracking of the elastomer located in the rib tip. In this paper, fracture experiments were conducted using single-edge notched tension (SENT) specimens to study the fracture behaviour of a belt rib compound. A finite-element modelling method utilizing singular elements for crack in rubber solid was proposed and implemented in both planestress and 3D solid models using ABAQUS. A newly developed neural-network-based model was used to represent a nonlinear elastic belt rib rubber compound. The crack finite-element model, along with the neural-network-based material model, was verified with analytical and experimental results. A global-local finite-element procedure was developed to evaluate the J-integral for mode-I through-the-thickness crack in V-ribbed belt rib. Effects of pre-crack length, pulley pre-load and backside pulley displacement were investigated.
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