In this work, the bending fatigue strengths of injection-molded symmetric and asymmetric nylon 66 gears were evaluated experimentally, and the results were substantiated using numerical studies. The symmetric (20°/20°) and asymmetric (34°/20° and 20°/34°) configurations were subjected to bending fatigue tests under a load controlled mode. The bending stresses of the symmetric and asymmetric gears were predicted by quasi-static simulations using a commercial finite element analysis software. The form factor ([Formula: see text]) and the stress correction factor ([Formula: see text]) were computed using an adapted ISO method. The 34°/20° configuration exhibited the lowest bending stress and highest bending fatigue life among the tested configurations. The form factor exerted a decisive influence on the magnitude of the bending stress compared to the stress correction factor. For the considered loading conditions, deflection-induced load sharing occurred in the 20°/20° and 20°/34° configurations but was absent in the 34°/20° configuration. Failure analysis indicated that a high stress concentration caused multiple cracks in the fillets of asymmetric gears.

The present work investigates the normal and tangential peeling behaviour of a gecko spatula using a coupled adhesion-friction model. The objective is to explain the strong attachment and easy detachment behaviour of the spatulae as well as to understand the principles behind their optimum design. Using nonlinear finite element computations, it is shown that during tangentially-constrained peeling the partial sliding of the spatula pad near the peeling front stretches the spatula, thus increasing the strain energy and leading to high pull-off forces. The model is used to investigate the influence of various parameters on the pull-off forces -such as the peeling angle, spatula shaft angle, strip thickness, and material stiffness. The model shows that increasing the spatula pad thickness beyond a certain level does not lead to a significant increase in the attachment forces. Further, the easy detachment behaviour of geckos is studied under tangentially-free peeling conditions. It is found that the spatulae readily detach from the substrate by changing their shaft angle and eventually peel vertically like a tape. Since the present computational model is not limited by the geometrical, kinematical, and material restrictions of theoretical models, it can be employed to analyse similar biological adhesive systems.

Finite element method has been successfully implemented on the graphics processing units to achieve a significant reduction in simulation time. In this paper, new strategies for the finite element matrix generation including numerical integration and assembly are proposed by using a warp per element for a given mesh. These strategies are developed using the well-known coloring method. The proposed strategies use a specialized algorithm to realize fine-grain parallelism and efficient use of on-chip memory resources. The warp shuffle feature of Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) is used to accelerate numerical integration. The evaluation of elemental stiffness matrix is further optimized by adopting a partial parallel implementation of numerical integration. Performance evaluations of the proposed strategies are done for three-dimensional elasticity problem using the 8-noded hexahedral elements with three degrees of freedom per node. We obtain a speedup of up to 8.2× over the coloring based assembly by element strategy (using a single thread per element) on NVIDIA Tesla K40 GPU. Also, the proposed strategies achieve better arithmetic throughput and bandwidth. Highlights CUDA Warp based strategies for FE matrix generation and assembly. Performed using coloring method and on linear hexahedral element meshing in 3D. Obtained speedup of 5.17×− 8.2× over single thread per element strategy on GPU. Strategies showed better arithmetic throughput and bandwidth through code profiling.

Isogeometric analysis (IGA) is a recently introduced technique that employs the Computer Aided Design (CAD) concept of Non-uniform Rational B-splines (NURBS) tool to bridge the substantial bottleneck between the CAD and finite element analysis (FEA) fields. The simplified transition of exact CAD models into the analysis alleviates the issues originating from geometrical discontinuities and thus, significantly reduces the design-toanalysis time in comparison to traditional FEA technique. Since its origination, the research in the field of IGA is accelerating and has been applied to various problems. However, the employment of CAD tools in the area of FEA invokes the need of adapting the existing implementation procedure for the framework of IGA. Also, the usage of IGA requires the in-depth knowledge of both the CAD and FEA fields. This can be overwhelming for a beginner in IGA. Hence, in this paper, a simplified introduction and implementation details for the incorporation of NURBS based IGA technique within the existing FEA code is presented. It is shown that with little modifications, the available standard code structure of FEA can be adapted for IGA. For the clear and concise explanation of these modifications, step-by-step implementation of a benchmark plate with a circular hole under the action of in-plane tension is included.

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