Introduction

You are now working as a FEA engineer for a Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) consultancy company called Dantech. This morning, your manager assigned you a new contract of a collaborative research project with an automotive company, XYZ Ltd., who wanted to design and optimise the connecting rods for their Internal Combustion (IC) engines.

DESIGN

Your job is to design the connecting rod with minimum weight and evaluate its natural frequency of vibration. You are free to choose any design for your connecting rod and calculate the maximum force it will take before yield. The yield stress for the connecting rod material, which is made out of steel (E=210 GPa and Poisson's ration as 0.33) is 300 MPa. You are required to calculate the maximum axial force (F) your design will withstand before yielding. You can use Von-Mises criteria for your design analysis. The only constraints in your design are the big-end diameter "D" and small end diameter "d" and the length of the centre-to-centre distance (L) of the connecting rod.