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
This article presents the challenges of conducting fatigue analysis on rubber components due to their nonlinear behaviour, contrasting this with linear superposition methods used in metal fatigue analysis. Traditional linear methods are effective for linear materials, allowing for efficient stress-strain history generation through the scaling of finite element (FE) solutions based on input load histories. However, these methods fail for rubber because of its complex material properties and behaviours.
endurica automotive
