Getting bounced: Investigating the loads and durability of a Pogo Stick
A light-hearted coronavirus lockdown project with a useful outcome
Newsletter EnginSoft Year 17 n°2
By Tim Hunter, Wolf Star Technologies, LLC | Will Mars, Endurica
This light-hearted technical article discusses a project undertaken between WolfStar Technologies’ Tim Hunter and Endurica’s Will Mars during the Coronavirus lockdown – to create a digital twin of a Pogo Stick in order to calculate its fatigue damage in the hands of a novice user. The Pogo Stick was turned into a load transducer using finite element analysis (FEA) so that the strain gauge locations could be identified, and the strain data collected, to create the operating deflection shapes of the toy.
These were then fed into Endurica to subsequently calculate the fatigue damage on the rubber – with all load and damage calculations processed in real time.
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CASE STUDY
The article focuses on the difference in fatigue behaviour between rubber and metal materials. While metal fatigue is often described by a simple rule: increasing mean strain is detrimental to fatigue life, rubber fatigue is more complex and depends on the material's ability to strain crystallize. The text concludes that while tensile mean stresses are always detrimental in metals, in rubber they may be either beneficial or harmful depending on whether the rubber can strain crystallize.
mechanics endurica automotive
