Automotive bushings

Bushings play a vital role in vehicle suspension systems by isolating noise and vibration while allowing controlled mechanical movement. Composed of rubber-like materials, they experience large, complex deformations, making accurate modelling essential for optimising vibro-acoustic performance. This necessitates advanced simulation techniques that can capture nonlinear, nearly incompressible behaviour with high fidelity and numerical stability.

To address these challenges, we employ a mixed (multifield) formulation that treats stress as an independent unknown field. Key innovations of this approach include:

• Decoupling of nonlinearities into separate equations
• A priori satisfaction of conservation laws, including momentum flux continuity
• Optimised memory access, trading floating point operations for local and temporal memory use
• Ultra-weak formulation, well-suited to unilateral constraints from contact and geometric instabilities
• Sparse dense block structure for efficient computation
• GPU-ready architecture, designed for future high-performance hardware

In addition, we implemented automatic contact self-detection, enabling robust and accurate handling of contact under large deformations without manual intervention.