Design optimization and analysis of a connecting rod of a vehicle engine using CAE tools

in the engine. To reduce the obliquity of the connecting rod with the cylinder axis, its length should be kept as large as possible. Reduced obliquity decreases the oscillatory angular motion of the connecting rod about its small end, thereby decreasing the piston side thrust and improving the reciprocating balance of the engine. On account of the current practice to reduce the overall height of the engine, the length of connecting rod has been decreased from 4 to 4.5 times the crank throw to about 3.5 times. A combination of axial and bending stresses acts on the rod in operation. The axial stresses are produced due to cylinder gas pressure (compressive only) and the inertia force arising in account of reciprocating action (both tensile as well as compressive), where as bending stresses are caused due to the centrifugal effects. To provide maximum rigidity with minimum weight the main cross section of the connecting rod is made an I-section is made to blend smoothly into two rod ends called the small end (piston end) and big end (crank end). Webster et al. (1983) performed three dimensional finite element analysis of a high-speed diesel engine connecting rod. For this analysis they used the maximum compressive load which was measured experimentally, and the maximum tensile load which is essentially the inertia load of the piston assembly mass. The load distributions on the piston pin end and crank end were determined experimentally. They modeled the connecting rod cap separately, and also modeled the bolt pretension using beam elements and multi point constraint equations. Currently the dynamic analysis of the internal combustion engine for a given configuration and specifications is most widely conducted using a physical test rig. Though the analysis of in-process stress is very much difficult owing to the complications of the system and the temperature of the piston and cylinder assembly, all these process are manually operated therefore itis time consuming. Dynamic analysis of the IC engine can also be performed using dynamic simulation software like MSC ADAMS, MATLAB SimMechanics, ANSYS and the results of the dynamic analysis can then be imported into a FEA software which can solve for structural solutions like stress, deformation.