What is the Price of Standing Still?

What if we don't change at all and something magical just happens? Technical equation for entropy

“We have always done it this way.” No longer simply a hated phrase, this statement is a warning of impending disaster. Entropy – the disorder that happens when energy disperses and systems simply fall into chaos – happens when things do not change. But it’s a slow process you don’t see day-to-day. Continuing with traditional “build and break” development methods instead of embracing CAE and simulation has many long-term risks but it will only be after stagnating for some time that rubber parts manufacturing firms, and even the entire rubber industry, will realize the pitfalls:

Talent Loss
People are the key to it all and we start here since intelligent, hard-working, productive people are the fundamental reason any business succeeds. When the best and brightest employees leave a company, the fundamental reasons often include the lack of opportunity, learning, and career development. When not allowed to work with emerging technologies and are no longer challenged to grow, top performers find new opportunities taking not only raw potential but also institutional memory with them. And if they don’t see the industry as a viable long-term option, switching companies can also mean leaving the sector completely.

Warranty Issues/Payouts
Liability issues arise when product usage, applications and environments bring risks that may not have been factored in to the original designs and/or production methods. Traditional testing methods cannot be used to investigate “what if?” scenarios the way CAE and simulation can. Recalls and litigation can be significantly more costly than new technology implementations.

Lost Opportunity Costs
While harder to measure than fixed and variable business costs, there is an expense to every choice known as opportunity cost. Refusing to enter a new business sector may result in significant loss of revenue and profit. Taking on a big client project may strain production capabilities. “Standing still” eliminates those risks, but at what potential gain? As the rubber industry wrestles to “go green” we are all weighing and measuring the opportunity costs involved. The real lost opportunity is in refusing to embrace a fundamentally better design platform.

Incompatibility or Obsolescence
At some point, everything being produced right now will become obsolete. Even if you produce the best “widgets” anywhere, the environment around that “widget” will change and will no longer be needed in its current form. The rubber industry standard procedure of building a product then breaking it in physical testing to determine the next design rendition is incompatible with the time available for new product development. It just does not work anymore.

How quickly your business can adapt to or anticipate change is a key factor in continued success. The reasons companies do not make continued progress often include:

Change is expensive
Investments in training, new production systems, updated software and computers add up, but these numbers are not insurmountable when factored against the ongoing and often increasing costs of waste, repairs and downtime associated with outdated systems and equipment.

Learning new technology is time-consuming
Remember when you were thinking about going to college and four (6-8-10) years seemed like FOREVER? What was your ROI? What will it be now? Time invested in learning reaps many rewards beyond the subject at hand and often provides renewed overall energy.

The status quo works
For today, yes. For a brighter future for you company and the industry, NO. Companies that don’t evolve face certain death. Day-to-day operations may appear stable, but firms who do not keep up with technology do not stay in business. Covid forced many to embrace technology in new ways and those firms continuing to provide progressive working arrangements are gathering more than their fair share of the best and brightest talent. Enabling people to work beyond traditional geographic boundaries requires accountability and processes for measuring valued contributions rather than simply time at a desk.  Firms embracing CAE and simulation technologies have realized this and are at the top of the leading rubber industry rankings.

 Six reasons to adopt Endurica workflows

  1. Technically superior (click for details)
  2. Save big on development out of pocket costs (click for details)
  3. Reduce the need for physical testing (see page 2, blue box on right)
  4. Speed to market (able to use the tools immediately)
  5. Accuracy in meeting client needs (click for details)
  6. Easier answers down the road (click for details)
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Introducing Tom Ebbott, the new Vice President at Endurica!

Thomas G. Ebbott, Ph.D. Vice President Endurica LLC

Hello everyone. I am really excited to be writing this as the newest member to Team Endurica! I am really enjoying my on-boarding with Will and the team thus far. I continue to learn all the capabilities that the Endurica software has to offer, along with all the services that Endurica the company offers. I’m looking forward to using my knowledge and experience with modeling and simulation combined with expertise in fatigue and fracture in polymers to bring value to Endurica’s customers.

Endurica’s software and services enable customers to monitor, predict and improve the endurance of products. This has a positive impact on many of today’s contemporary questions. For example, for sustainability, customers need to evaluate the durability impact of using a material with a more sustainable source, or one with better recyclability or re-useability in place of an existing material. Even re-designing a component to use less material, or to last longer is more sustainable. For electric vehicles, many of the elastomeric components are called on to carry higher loads and higher torques in the case of tires. And, for fleet operations, Endurica can be used to monitor the health of elastomeric systems and predict when maintenance will be needed.

I feel I have a good background to help both Will and the team at Endurica as well as Endurca’s many and wide-ranging customers. As many of you know, I recently retired from Goodyear after nearly 36 years with that great company. While I was at Goodyear, I worked with many wonderful and capable people, and I was fortunate to have many fulfilling experiences and roles. Some include developing fundamental technology, developing products–specifically Aviation Tires and Retreads, various people leadership roles, and finally a high-level technical leader role responsible for technical strategy. While at Goodyear, I was able to publish several papers on topics such as fracture mechanics of rubber in tires, temperature distribution and rolling resistance prediction for tires, crack growth in twisted rubber disks, and continuum damage analysis of cord-rubber structures. I served on The Tire Society Executive Committee for 8 years as Treasurer. One of my long-term contributions at Goodyear was to the 30-year partnership with Sandia National Laboratories.

For my formal training, I spent 10 years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that culminated in a PhD in Engineering Mechanics. My masters work focused on structural dynamics while my PhD research was on crack growth in polyethylene. The application of my PhD work was for the durability evaluation of natural gas distribution pipelines. The crack growth evaluation in (high density, high molecular weight) polyethylene required development of viscoelastic material laws and characterization as well as crack growth measurement systems, means to measure strain distributions, and use of viscoelastic crack growth theories.

On a personal note, my wife Sheri and I have two adult children. Amanda is teaching 2nd grade at a school near Columbus, OH, and Zachary is a junior pursuing a Finance degree at Regis University in Denver. One of my passions is flying, and I’ve had my private pilot’s license for many years. One of my most memorable flying trips was to New Mexico and Colorado. The photo shows my plane with the sun rising over the Sandia mountains in Albuquerque, NM.

I’m looking forward meeting and talking with Endurica’s customers in the coming months and learning about their needs and challenges concerning the use of elastomers and polymers for component design.

 

 

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Necessity and Invention: Getting Durability Right and Winning

Will Mars Delivering Keynote Presentation as Herzlich Medal Winner 2022

William V. Mars, Ph.D., P.E.
2022 Harold Herzlich Award Winner
Acceptance Speech
at ITEC 2022, Akron, Ohio on 15 September 2022

Three key takeaways from our founder’s acceptance speech of the tire industry’s highest award.

  1.  There is a point at which commercial simulation code outcompetes internally developed simulation code. Will talks about how this played out in the early days of finite element technology in the tire industry, and how the lessons learned apply to durability simulation today.
  2. Traditional is not the same as conservative. Will talks about the tension between the tire industry’s conservatism and the necessities that drive its progress, and how Endurica navigated its entry to the industry with its disruptive technology.
  3. The industry is going through a transition from scientific discovery and invention towards the empowerment of product developers to leverage advances in durability simulation. Will talks about the integration of testing and simulation workflows, and some of the capabilities that open new channels for gaining competitive advantage.

Check out the full talk here to enjoy some fun insights about Will’s personal journey through the years.

 

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Busting Myths About Endurica

Myths vs Facts on Endurica, Test your knowledge about Endurica

True or False? Test your knowledge about Endurica

Endurica is only a software company.
False. While Endurica is perhaps best known for its game-changing fatigue solver software, we also deliver industry-leading testing services, testing instruments, and training.  If you need durability for elastomers, we are uniquely positioned to bring you winning capabilities.

Endurica is used by the majority of top rubber product makers.
True.  As of the 2021 Rubber News global rankings report, 6 of the top 9 global rubber product makers are using Endurica solutions to characterize and simulate durability.

Endurica invented Critical Plane Analysis.
False, but...  Critical Plane Analysis – the technology that gives best accuracy fatigue life predictions under complex multiaxial loading – was originally pioneered by the metals fatigue community.  But Endurica does hold the patent on the first Critical Plane Analysis algorithm suitable for elastomers, and we are the world leaders in making the technology available to product developers.

Wohler curve based methods are just as accurate and competitive as Endurica’s Critical Plane / Fracture Mechanics-based method.
False. Wohler curve based methods suffer from many problems that are solved by the Critical Plane Method.  1) they often assume a wrong crack orientation rather than searching for the most damaging scenario, 2) they do not account properly for mode of deformation effects, 3) the testing program required to populate a Wohler curve scales poorly and has poor repeatability.

I don’t need Endurica software if I already have a metal fatigue code (nCode DesignLife, FEMFAT, MSC Fatigue, and fe-safe).
False. Metals and elastomers have completely distinct molecular structures and behaviors.  While metals operate at small strain, elastomers tend to operate at large strain.  Where metals exhibit linear elasticity, elastomers exhibit nonlinear behavior.  Using a metal fatigue code for analyzing elastomer fatigue is like trying to use a car as a boat: you can certainly drive the car into the water, but you end up on the bottom of the lake.

Endurica solvers work with Ansys, Simulia, and Hexagon simulation platforms
True. We maintain software development partnerships with the major finite element software vendors so that we can offer easy to use pre-and post- integrations with Ansys, Abaqus, and MSC/Marc.  You can use the Endurica workflows with the finite element code that works for you.  We also develop the fe-safe/Rubber plugin.

Everyone knows you can simulate durability.
False. We’re always surprised by the number of people at conferences and trade shows who don’t know that simulating the durability of rubber is even possible.  Our tools simulate everything from basic constant amplitude cyclic loading, to variable amplitude, multiaxial loading (up to 6 input channels!), ageing, strain crystallization, ozone attack, cyclic softening, creep crack growth, self-heating, block cycle schedules, residual life.  Our multi-threading capabilities mean that large jobs can execute quickly.  Our solvers are fast enough to compute damage in real-time for a full finite element model!

Endurica solutions have had significant commercial impact.
True.  Endurica was founded in 2008 to reduce rubber product launch cost and risk and we have saved our clients millions of dollars.  Endurica’s impact was recognized with the prestigious U.S. Small Business Administration Tibbetts award.

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Get Durability AND Sustainability Right with Endurica

Sustainability is all about Precycling with Endurica

How do you respond to the call for sustainable solutions in the rubber industry?  Is it via bio-sourced polymers or fillers? elimination of carcinogenic additives from the compound? Inclusion of recycled content in the material?  light-weighting aimed at reducing material use or at fuel economy improvements?  supply of critical components to EVs?

There are many paths to sustainability, but they are all constrained by these three filters:

  1. Most alternatives risk a reduction in durability (despite the optimistic claims of suppliers).
  2. Your product still must pass its durability qualification requirements.
  3. The number of development iterations is severely limited by the time and cost of durability testing.

Endurica workflows have been driving a “right the first time” engineering culture for the last 14 years.  Putting durability characterization and simulation upfront in your development programs means that you find and resolve issues earlier and cheaper than if you depended only on your qualification to discover issues. 

With Endurica, you can rapidly evaluate the durability of a series of alternative materials under realistic conditions before you build the first physical prototype.  The impacts of polymer alternatives, filler alternatives, additives, recycled content alternatives, etc. can be characterized with a minimal sample of the material and represented accurately with Endurica’s material modeling capabilities.  You can see how material property changes play out in your actual part geometry, under actual part loading histories.  All without building a single prototype part.  The modeling process is simple to automate, enabling much richer explorations of the available design space.  Where a purely prototype-based development program may be able to compare two or three alternatives over a six-month period, a simulation-based program can compare several hundred alternatives in the space of a week! 

Just because it can be hard to find a sustainable alternative doesn’t mean that they aren’t out there.  It is their relative rarity that makes them so valuable.  The next crop of winning products will come from those who can quickly and reliably navigate durability.

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Tire Society Takeaways 2021

Image of a TireThe Tire Society held its 40th annual meeting last month with the theme The Virtual Tire.  It has always been the place to see up and coming ideas, to see who is pushing into the frontiers of the field, and to renew professional connections across the industry.  Endurica was very proud to sponsor this year.

Here’s a brief recap of our favorite talks…

GM LogoGM’s Mike Anderson, Executive Director of Global Virtual Design, Development and Validation, kicked off the meeting with his keynote lecture, titled “The Move To Virtual”.  He spoke of GM’s target to achieve 100% virtual design by 2025.  Anderson explained that this doesn’t mean that physical testing will go away, but rather that GM is dead serious about getting to a “right the first time” scenario rather than a “discover and recover” mode.  “It’s a measure twice, cut once” culture, he said.  He noted that upstart competitors are sprinting ahead in areas like EVs through the use of simulation and that the speed of discovery has increased significantly in the current competitive environment.  Simulation drives learning speed, not only because of the opportunity to get engineering answers at the pre-build phase but also because it enables exploration of more of the design space and more of the performance outcomes.  He told the conference that “we need to go beyond just replicating physical tests with simulation, we need to leverage the strength of simulation to go beyond test”.  In the Q&A, Anderson was asked whether suppliers will also be expected to be virtual.  “That’s gonna be tough to play together” for rubber part suppliers that can’t engage via simulation.

There were three talks given by Endurica users at this year’s Tire Society meeting.

Maxxis Tires LogoPooya Behroozinia of Maxxis Tires spoke on “Tire Durability Prediction Using Three-Element Layered Mesh for Cord-Rubber Composites”.  Behroozinia shared a tire meshing technique for improving representation of interlaminar shearing in their tire model.  They used Endurica DT to simulate the damage accruing across all of the 6 steps in a stepped-up load durability test, and they were able to predict correctly the lower sidewall failure mode, the life (45 hours observed, 38 hours predicted), and the crack orientation.  They also had a 2nd validation case in which the loads were increased by 10% in all steps of the test.  The simulation again predicted correct failure, and the comparison of experimental life (41000 km) to simulated life (36330 km) was in good agreement.

CEAT LogoVidit Bansal of CEAT spoke on “Incremental, Critical Plane Analysis and Experimental Verification for TBR Tyre Bead Endurance Applications”.  Similar to the Maxxis paper, CEAT used Endurica DT to simulate a multi-step durability test with loads ranging from 80% to 250%.  In this paper, two different truck tire sizes were modeled and tested, a 10.00R20 and an 11.00R20.  The analysis correctly predicted the ply turnup as the critical location.  The predicted lives of the two tire sizes were predicted at 90-93% of the actual tested life in both cases.

Goodyear LogoTom Ebbott and Gobi Gobinath of Goodyear spoke on “A Model for Predicting Residual Casing Life of a Tire Following an Impact Event”.  This work demonstrated the consequences on tire damage development of a range of impact event scenarios (3 speeds, 4 impact angles, 3 different wear states) early in the life of the tire.  It used Endurica DT to accrue damage from both the impact event (computed with explicit FEA) and subsequent tire runout under steady state rolling conditions (computed with implicit FEA).  The crack growth rate curve during the impact was based upon experimental measurements of the critical tearing energy at impact rates.  When asked about experimental validation of the simulation results during the Q&A, Ebbott noted that “the modeling work stands on its own – it is based on sound physics”.

We at Endurica were delighted with the significance and innovation on display in all of these talks.  We have often been challenged to show validation for tire durability predictions, but such measurements are difficult to obtain without significant tire testing resources. So, the fact that the Maxxis and CEAT papers showed multiple direct comparisons of tire durability tests with simulations, and the fact that excellent predictions of both failure mode and tire life were achieved was a very significant moment for us and for the industry.

The Goodyear paper was significant for a different reason.  Their paper showed an application that would have been difficult or impossible to evaluate with physical testing.  They showed how getting the right physics into the model builds the trust necessary to leverage simulation to increase the speed and scope of discovery and to go beyond the limits of physical testing.  It was the perfect illustration of keynoter Mike Anderson’s point that simulation opens significant opportunities for competitive advantage and ‘right the first time’ engineering.

Click here to download a .pdf summary of this blog post: Endurica Spotlight on The Tire Society 2021 Annual Meeting The Virtual Tire

 

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Virtual vs. Physical in 2021 and Beyond

An insight to how Endurica stayed connected during Covid-19, by using Microsoft teams to meet virtually.These days everybody’s talking about whether to meet in person or online.  There are great tools available for online meetings, and these have helped us navigate Covid-19. Like everyone else, Endurica teammates regularly use online meeting technology.  But if there is one thing we learned over the last year, it is that sometimes physical presence really matters. Living and working in isolation is just not healthy in the long run.

The new normal during the pandemic had some benefits that were enabled by the virtual world. Time and energy that used to be consumed by travel were rechanneled into improving our software, testing services, and marketing materials. In our personal lives, we had more opportunities to spend quality time with our immediate families and found more time for fitness activities. We previously talked about our pandemic pivots to bring our training courses online and offer webinars to stay in touch with our existing and potential customers.

But virtual meetings can’t replace the full experience of being together in person.  The face-to-face engagement at a trade show, the serendipitous bumping into a client, the spontaneous discussion of ideas with fellow conference-goers with a shared interest, the rapport building that comes from shared experiences.  We fundamentally need physical connection. A hug, delivered via Zoom, will never feel the same.

The world of 2021 and beyond is hybrid: part virtual, part in-person.  The benefits of the virtual are too great to set aside, and the necessity of the physical is too compelling to neglect.  Both are critical to our future, at home and at work.

So, too, with Endurica’s simulation workflows. It was NEVER Simulation OR Build-and-Break. Even the best simulations are not enough to completely skip physical testing. The virtual approach saves significant time and money in product development and design refinement. It allows you to explore a huge space of compound options and of design features before investment in building and testing prototypes. Our simulations enable you to balance difficult trade-offs. Still, before you head into production, you must complete actual physical testing on your rubber part – the physical world is what counts in the end. It is simulation AND build-and-break that are both needed in concert to #GetDurabilityRight.

Just as a Zoom hug will never replace the real thing, software will never replace the role of physical testing.  But just as online meetings are creating new opportunities and efficiencies, Endurica’s tools position you for unprecedented success when it’s time to test.

It's a Hybrid World from Here | Endurica's tools position you for unprecedented success when it’s time to test.

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Things that went right in 2020 at Endurica

Things that went right in 2020 at Endurica

2020 is burned in all our minds as a chaotic and tough year.  Just like the rest of the world, Endurica staff experienced times of isolation and loss due to the pandemic.  On a positive note, we invested heavily in making our tools and workflows better than ever so that we’re ready to come back strong in 2021.  Here is a list of our top new developments in 2020:

Endurica Software Enhancements

  • Endurica DT’s new Ageing Feature now enables you to simulate how ageing affects your rubber product. Your compound’s stiffness, strength, and fatigue properties can all evolve with time.
  • Our new Linux distribution takes our solutions beyond the Windows world.
  • We’ve added an encryption feature to safeguard your trade secrets.
  • Viewer Improvements make it easier than ever to visualize your fatigue simulation results.
  • EIE Enhancements give you blazing-fast compute speed for full road-load signals.
  • We’ve also planned an aggressive development agenda for 2021. Stay tuned for a new Endurica-based smartphone app for materials engineers, for a new feature that computes fatigue threshold safety margins, for a new block cycle schedule extraction algorithm, and more!

Training

  • The new Fatigue Ninja Friday webinar series provides step-by-step application training for key the workflows that you need to get durability right. All of the recorded episodes are now available in the online Endurica academy.
  • The new Winning on Durability webinar series provides high-level overviews of both technical and business topics so you can connect Endurica tools to your strategic imperatives. All of these recorded webinars are available gratis on our website.
  • We’ve recast our in-person training events as LIVE, ONLINE workshops accessible safely around the world.

Testing Instruments

Fatigue Property Mapping Testing Service

  • We added the Reliability Module to our Fatigue Property Mapping testing service. Use it to quantify crack precursor size statistics when you need to estimate probability of failure.
  • We also reorganized the Thermal Module and the Ageing Module into Basic and Advanced levels, to offer a lower price-point when a basic option will suffice.

Want to leverage any of these new capabilities in your next durability project?  Give us a call and let’s talk!

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Durability of 3D Printed Elastomer Structures

If you are involved in 3D printing with elastomers, can you predict the fatigue behavior?

How is product lifetime affected by complex lattice designs with multiaxial stresses, and what is the impact of printing defects?

Scientific literature and social media are abound with amazing examples of the potential for 3D printed articles made from metals, plastics and elastomers for use in many fields including the biomedical area. Researchers at ETH Zürich recently 3D printed a functioning artificial heart made from a silicone material. A picture of the device is shown below, and the story can be viewed elsewhere.1,2 This pioneering work represents a very noteworthy achievement. This research also highlights the importance of understanding elastomer durability in these cutting edge applications, as the silicone heart only survived 3,000 beats or about 30 minutes.

But the material can only keep going for 3,000 beats at this time.

One of the key differences between 3D printing (additive manufacturing) and conventional manufacturing is the ability of 3D printing processes to create complex structures containing open spaces, often lattice-like in nature. Perhaps the most innovative and high profile example of a 3D printed product with lattice construction is the midsole for the Adidas Futurecraft 4D shoe that is created using the Carbon 3D technology.3

a 3D printed product with lattice construction is the midsole for the Adidas Futurecraft 4D shoe that is created using the Carbon 3D technology.

Overall stresses that are relatively modest and unidirectional translate into much higher stress, multiaxial conditions within the struts of a lattice structure like the shoe sole example above. The finite element simulation below illustrates this for a lattice structure undergoing simple compression (thanks to Mark Bauman, engineering analyst at Endurica).

 finite element simulation illustrates this for a lattice structure undergoing simple compression

Multiaxial load cases, crack closure considerations, and other complexities that arise in lattice designs and make it impossible to predict fatigue behavior using simplistic approaches such as Wohler / stress(S)-lifetime(N) curves, can be readily handled using the Endurica CL elastomer fatigue solver for Abaqus, MSC Marc, and ANSYS finite element analysis to predict when and where cracks will show up in the structure.

Cracks in an elastomer start out as microscopic precursors that grow due to applied cyclic loading according to a characteristic crack growth rate law for the material.4 In combination with critical plane analysis, this rubber fracture mechanics approach is the cornerstone of our Endurica CL software. The crack precursors – also called intrinsic defects or flaws – are especially important to pay attention to in the additive manufacturing of products in which voids or defects can be introduced by the printing process. The Core Module of our Fatigue Property Mapping testing services includes quantification of crack precursor size, and our new Reliability Module characterizes its distribution. The figure below illustrates the clear influence of crack precursor size on tensile strength in a study wherein we intentionally introduced glass microspheres as flaws in the rubber compound.5 Fatigue lifetime shows the same strong dependence on flaw size.

the clear influence of crack precursor size on tensile strength in a study wherein we intentionally introduced glass microspheres as flaws in the rubber compound

Endurica has the software, testing solutions, and expertise to help you understand and improve the durability of your 3D printed elastomer applications, so contact us to see how we can help you #GetDurabilityRight in the additive manufacturing world.

References

  1. https://www.sciencealert.com/this-3d-printed-soft-artificial-heart-beats-just-like-a-real-one
  2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUYNXeHfTdQ
  3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlomslovAnI
  4. W. V. Mars, “Fatigue life prediction for elastomeric structures”, Rubber Chemistry and Technology 80, 481 (2007), https://doi.org/10.5254/1.3548175.
  5. C. G. Robertson, L. B. Tunnicliffe, L. Maciag, M. A. Bauman, K. Miller, C. R. Herd, and W. V. Mars, “Characterizing Tensile Strength Distribution to Evaluate Filler Dispersion Effects and Reliability of Rubber”, paper presented at the Fall 196th Technical Meeting of the Rubber Division, American Chemical Society (International Elastomer Conference), Cleveland, OH, October 8-10, 2019.

 

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Will Mars on the Rubber Industry: A Look Back 10 Years, Where We Are Now, A Look Ahead 10 Years

 Dr. William V. Mars Q: With regards to fatigue life prediction methods, where was the rubber industry 10 years ago?

Will There was plenty of great academic work and good understanding of fundamentals, but the methods were only deployed – if at all – via “homebuilt” solutions that could never support a broad enough audience to really impact daily product design decisions.  Simulation methods and experimental methods shared theoretical foundations but they were poorly integrated.  They suffered from operational problems, noisy data and open-ended test duration.  It was possible to analyze a crack if you could mesh it, but the added bookkeeping and convergence burdens were usually not sustainable in a production engineering context.  Mostly, analysts relied on tradition-based crack nucleation approaches that would look at quantities like strain or stress or strain energy density.  These were not very accurate and they were limiting in many ways, even though they were widely used.  They left companies very dependent on build and break iterations.

Q: Where is the industry today?

Will: The early adopters of our solutions have been off and running now for a number of years.  Our critical plane method has gained recognition for its high accuracy when dealing with multiaxial cases, cases involving crack closure, cases involving strain crystallization.  Our testing methods have gained recognition for high reliability and throughput.  Our users are doing production engineering with our tools.  They are consistently winning on durability issues.  They are handling durability issues right up front when they bid for new business.  They are expanding their in-house labs to increase testing capacity and they are winning innovation awards from OEMs.  They are using actual road-load cases from their customers to design light-weight, just-right parts that meet durability requirements.  The automotive industry has lead adoption but aerospace, tires, energy, and consumer products are also coming up.  We have users across the entire supply chain: raw material suppliers, component producers and OEMs.  The huge value that was locked up because durability was previously so difficult to manage is now unlocked in new ways for the first time.  This has been the wind in Endurica’s sails for the last 10 years.

Q: Where do you see the industry in 10 years?

Will: In 10 years, OEMs will expect durability from all component producers on day 1, even for radical projects.  They will expect designs already optimized for cost and weight.  They will push more warrantee responsibility to the supplier.  They will monitor durability requirements via shared testing and simulation workflows.  Suppliers will pitch solutions using characterization and simulation to show their product working well in your product.  The design and selection of rubber compounds to match applications will enter a golden age as real-world customer usage conditions will finally be taken fully into account.  Where design and selection was previously limited by the budget for a few build and break iterations, and low visibility of design options, they will soon be informed by an almost unlimited evaluation of all possibilities.  Where simulation methods have traditionally had greatest impact on product design functions, we will also start to see rubber part Digital Twins that track damage accumulation and create value in the operational functions of a business.  Durability is definitely set to become a strong arena for competition in the next 10 years.

 

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