Issue 75

V. Landersheim et alii, Fracture and Structural Integrity, 75 (2026) 297-314; DOI: 10.3221/IGF-ESIS.75.21

Experimental and numerical analyses of stiffness and fatigue properties of a spring element for mounts with tunable stiffness made of C85S+QT sheet steel

Volker Landersheim, Cedric Mathieu, Jan Hansmann, William Kaal Fraunhofer Institute for Structural Durability and System Reliability LBF, Germany volker.landersheim@lbf.fraunhofer.de, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0877-7899 cedric.mathieu@lbf.fraunhofer.de, https://orcid.org/0009-0008-0468-9681 jan.hansmann@lbf.fraunhofer.de, https://orcid.org/0009-0008-9375-4499 william.kaal@lbf.fraunhofer.de, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7526-3599

Citation: Landersheim, V., Mathieu, C., Hansmann, J., Kaal, W., Fatigue properties of a spring element for mounts with tunable stiffness made of C85S+QT sheet steel, Fracture and Structural Integrity, 75 (2026) 297-314.

Received: 20.08.2025 Accepted: 29.09.2025 Published: 12.11.2025 Issue: 01.2026

Copyright: © 2026 This is an open access article under the terms of the CC-BY 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

K EYWORDS . Stiffness, Fatigue, Tunable mounts, S-N curve, Component test, FEA.

I NTRODUCTION

he performance of many technical systems depends on some kind of stiffness inside the respective system. For example, the ride dynamics of a vehicle strongly depend on the stiffness and damping setup of the chassis [1], the accuracy of robot based milling processes is limited by the mechanical resonance frequency of the system [2], and the efficiency of a rotational energy harvesting vibration absorber depends on the correct tuning which is – among other parameters – defined by the rotational stiffness of the system [3]. T

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