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SAE TECHNICAL
PAPER SERIES 980463

A Finite Element Approach to Study the Effect of

High Modulus Urethane on Body Stiffness
Gururaj Kathawate and Wei Li
Essex Specialty Products, Inc.

International Congress and Exposition

Detroit, Michigan
February 23-26, 1998

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A Finite Element Approach to Study the Effect of High Modulus
Copyright © 1998 Society of Automotive Engineers, Inc.
ABSTRACT
Urethane is utilized to bond the windshield and backlite to
the vehicle frame. The contribution of different modulii of
glass bonding urethane adhesives on the stiffness char-
acteristics of the vehicle is studied through finite element
analysis. The modal analyses of a finite element body-in-
white model with different modulii of urethanes are per-
formed, and the analyses show that high modulus ure-
thane makes notable contribution to the vehicle stiffness.
The optimized modulus of urethane adhesive is sug-
gested based on the analyses.
INTRODUCTION
Noise, Vibration and Harshness (NVH) is a great concern
in the automotive industry, and many efforts have been
made to address this issue. One of the approaches of
NVH control is to stiffen the body structure of automo-
biles so as to increase the modal frequencies of a vehi-
cle. There are a variety of approaches to stiffen vehicle
structure such as increasing thickness of the steel panels
and using more constraints, but these could lead to more
weight and higher costs.
Recent study [1] showed that glass bonding urethane
could effect the overall stiffness of the vehicle structure.
Glass mounting adhesive urethane is commonly used to
bond windshield and backlite to the vehicle frame, and
provides impact resisting and leakage-proof functions.
Federal Highway Administration specified that windshield
mounting material must meet Federal Motor Vehicle
Safety Standard (FMVSS) for crash and roll-over crush
incidents. In addition to those functions, glass bonding
urethane is an important part of vehicle structure integ-
rity, and it preserves the overall structure of the vehicle
with the door, side window, and windshield retention
areas. Therefore, its properties effect the overall stiff-
ness of the vehicle. However, since many studies were
focused on urethane retention analysis when involving
vehicle impacting, the contribution of different modulii of
glass bonding urethane on the vehicle stiffness needs
more detailed study.
1
980463
Urethane on Body Stiffness
Gururaj Kathawate and Wei Li
Essex Specialty Products, Inc.
This paper discusses how the variation in modulus of the
urethane adhesive effects the vehicle stiffness character-
istics from Finite Element Analysis (FEA) in addition to
experiment study [1]. The effectiveness will be evaluated
through the comparison of the modal frequencies of the
vehicle model with different modulii of urethane adhe-
sives. In this analysis, Finite Element (FE) method will
be utilized to acquire the modal frequencies of the vehicle
FE model. Throughout this paper, glass bonding ure-
thane adhesives will be classified into two categories
based on their Young’s modulus at 10% strain for conve-
nience: standard urethane refers to the urethane with
Young’s modulus less than 10 MPa; high modulus ure-
thane refers to the urethane with Young’s modulus higher
than 20 MPa.
MATERIAL EVALUATION
In order to perform modal analysis of the vehicle with the
different urethanes by using FEA, the material properties
such as Young’s modulus, Poisson’s ratio and density of
the urethanes had to be tested to provide the input to the
FE model. For the urethane adhesives with the different
modulii, their Poisson’s ratio and density did not vary sig-
nificantly, and only the Young’s modulus differentiates
one another. Young’s modulus was obtained from the
stress strain curve of the urethane tensile test. The fol-
lowing fig. 1 shows the stress-strain curve for the differ-
ent urethane adhesives.
25
20
Standard
Stress MPa
15
High Modulus
10
5
0
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4
Strain
Figure 1. Stress-strain curves of standard and high
modulus urethane
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FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS
FE method was selected to evaluate the variation of the
modulus of urethanes on stiffness contribution to the total
vehicle. For FE modal analysis, a midsize Body-In-White
(BIW) finite element model was built by using shell ele-
ments. Accordingly, windshield and backlite were mod-
eled as composite shell element. Modeling techniques of
adhesive urethane were investigated with solid and multi-
modal frequencies, i.e., bending, torsion and pumping
modes. For this case, depending on the modes,
improvement of the modal frequency varied from 0.9% to
7.1%. By applying high modulus urethane, the perfor-
mance improved 2-3% on the average without increasing
thickness of the steel panels to reinforce the global stiff-
ness of the vehicle, this was the significant observation.
Standard

Comparison (%)
108 High Modulus
ple spring element. Both modeling methods were capa- 106
ble of representing material behavior of adhesive 104
urethane so that solid element type was chosen to model 102
100
glass bonding adhesive. Figure 2 showed the FE model 98
of the vehicle. In this study, MSC/NASTRAN was used to 96
perform FE modal analysis of the vehicle body struc- 1st 1st 1st 2nd 2nd
ture. Firstly, modal analysis results of the standard ure- Torsion Bending Pumping Bending Torsion
thane, whose modulus is 10 MPa, was correlated with
the test data. After model verification, a series of modal Figure 3. Mode comparison of percentage improvement
analyses were done with high modulus urethanes, and of standard with high modulus urethane
Young’s modulus for high modulus cases were 35, 50, 70
MPa, respectively. Table 1 lists the comparison of the
modal frequencies and corresponding modal shapes of 37.2

Modal Frequency
the standard urethane and the high modulus urethanes. 37
Consequently, the maximum stiffness improvement was 36.8
obtained by comparing the modal frequencies of the

(Hz)
36.6
standard urethane with the high modulus urethane of 70
MPa. 36.4
1st torsion
36.2
36
10 20 30 40 50 60 70
Urethane Modulus (MPa)

Figure 4. Comparison of 1st torsion frequency with

urethane modulus variation

In addition, it was observed that the higher the urethane

modulus, the higher the modal frequencies of the vehicle
structure. This brought an interesting question that how
Figure 2. Vehicle FE model much increase in modulus of urethane was enough to
produce satisfactory stiffness improvement? In order to
find out the answer, as an example, the modal frequency
Table 1. Mode comparison for the vehicle with variation of 1st global torsion mode with different modulus
standard and high modulus urethanes of 10, 35, 50, 70 MPa was plotted in figure 4. It showed
Mode E=10 E=35 E=50 E=70 Mode Max. % that the frequency increased rapidly when the urethane
No. MPa MPa MPa MPa Description increase modulus increased from 10 MPa to 35 MPa, and after 35
(Hz) (Hz) (Hz) (Hz) MPa, the frequency kept increasing, but with much less
1 36.14 36.88 36.99 37.07 1st torsion 2.6 improvement. Therefore, ideal urethane modulus for 1st
2 37.02 37.22 37.30 37.37 1st bending 0.9
torsion mode was 35 MPa, and the similar results could
3 43.41 45.21 45.91 46.50 1st pumping 7.1
be concluded from other modes.
4 49.45 50.98 51.15 51.28 2nd bending 3.7
5 51.31 52.31 52.51 52.66 2nd torsion 2.6
CONCLUSION
“E” represents the material modulus.
Based on the discussion of the results, it was found out
RESULT DISCUSSIONS that the high modulus urethane increased the modal fre-
quencies of the vehicle body structure so as to increase
From the table 1, the maximum increase of the modal fre- the structure stiffness. The higher urethane modulus, the
quencies resulted from the high modulus case of 70 higher the improvement of the structure stiffness. For
MPa. Figure 3 showed bar-chart comparison of 10 MPa this specific vehicle model, 35 MPa of modulus was
and 70 MPa modulus on percentage improvement of the found to be ideal modulus, which improved the overall

2
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structure stiffness without sacrificing other parameters.

Additionally, this study showed that FEA was an efficient
and robust computation tool to evaluate material perfor-
mance. For the different vehicle model, it was recom-
mended that additional analysis was needed to obtain
the stiffness improvement due to high modulus urethane
application because the material contribution depended
on the vehicle base structure.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to thank the Glass Bonding busi-

ness team of Essex Specialty Products, Inc. for their
wonderful support in creation of this document, and our
Advanced Engineering team members, Jay Tudor, David
Tao for their outstanding efforts.

REFERENCES

1. Kathawate, Gururaj, Use of High Modulus Glass Bonding

Urethanes to Improve Vehicle Stiffness, Proceedings of
IBEC 97, Stuttgart, Germany, Sept. 30 - Oct. 2, 1997.