RESUMO Com a necessidade de aperfeiçoamento do processo de transmissão e distribuição de energia elétrica, as indústrias e concessionárias desse setor estão em busca de componentes mais otimizados para suas linhas de transmissão. Em consequência, há a necessidade de aprimorar a formação do cabo condutor, que é o elemento mais oneroso das linhas elétricas. Nestas circunstâncias, condutores formados apenas por fios de alumínio aparentam ser mais vantajosos em relação aos cabos com alma de aço, obtendo melhores índices de ampacidade/peso, diminuindo assim, o custo de transmissão. Neste cenário, o objetivo deste artigo, foi verificar a influência do fenômeno de fadiga por fretting sob condições controladas, nos fios de liga de alumínio AA 6201 T81 e AA 1120 H19, que formam os condutores CAL 900 MCM e CAL 823 MCM, respectivamente. Para alcançar tal fim, criou-se um programa experimental capaz de adquirir os dados sobre a resistência à fadiga dos cabos condutores e dos fios de forma separada, a fim de analisar a influência do fretting sob o parâmetro de carga normal de contato de 750 N. Ao examinar os resultados, o condutor CAL 900 MCM obteve a menor resistência à fadiga, apesar de ser constituído por uma liga com melhores propriedades mecânicas. O mesmo resultado foi obtido nos ensaios de fadiga por fretting nos fios, deste modo, pôde-se inferir que a liga AA 6201 T81, embora possua melhor resistência à fadiga, ela é mais suscetível a falha na presença de fretting quando comparada a liga AA 1120 H19.

ABSTRACT The electric transmission and distribution industries and utilities are looking for the most optimized components for their transmission lines. Thus, there is a need to improve the formation of the overhead conductor, which is the costliest element of electric transmission lines. Under these circumstances, conductors formed solely of aluminum wires appear to be more advantageous over aluminum conductor steel reinforced, obtaining better ampacity/weight ratios, thus lowering the transmission cost. The objective of this article was to verify the influence of the fretting fatigue phenomenon under controlled conditions, on the AA 6201 T81 and AA 1120 H19 aluminum alloy wires, which form the overhead conductors CAL 900 MCM and CAL 823 MCM, respectively. To achieve these goals, an experimental program was created capable of acquiring the data on the fatigue life of the overhead conductors and the wires separately, in order to verify the influence of fretting under a 750 N normal contact load parameter. In the results, the CAL 900 MCM achieved the lowest fatigue life, despite it made of an alloy with better mechanical properties. The same result was obtained in the fretting fatigue tests on wires, so it can be inferred that the AA 6201 T81 alloy, although it has better fatigue resistance, is more susceptible to failure in the presence of fretting when compared to AA 1120 H19 alloy.

ABSTRACT This study aimed to use a simulated vehicle to asses quantitatively the head and neck injuries of the occupants, in a frontal car crash, when the driver has only one hand on the steering wheel, such as while using a cell phone when driving. First, we conducted a survey of NHTSA reports on real laboratory tests of frontal collisions involving sedans. The effects of these collisions on the neck of a Hybrid III 50th percentile male crash test dummy were measured in terms of average head acceleration and force along the X, Z, and Y-axes. These acceleration, force and torque values obtained from the NHTSA database were used to validate the simulated model. The results obtained were compared with case E, the standard dummy position used in frontal collision tests. The results obtained in the simulation of the four cases of driving with only one hand demonstrate a probability of more than 67% that the driver will sustain AIS+2 injuries during a frontal crash. In all the cases, the skull fracture percentage was the most representative, occurring between 89 and 94% of cases where the driver had only one hand on the steering wheel.

Mechanical recycling is utilized to reuse waste and obtain other plastic products via the reprocessing of a material in industrial equipment. Natural fiber composites have become more popular in recent years; however, these composites' mechanical behavior remains less well-understood than single polymers’ behavior after recycling. Therefore, the objective of this work was to study the degradation of different sugarcane fibers/polypropylene composites using new grinding and injection processes and to evaluate the mechanical properties of these materials using analysis of variance (ANOVA). This work reveals the mechanical behaviors of recycled natural fiber composites that contain thermal stabilizer additives. Polypropylene composites reinforced with differently treated bagasse and straw fibers (10 and 20 wt%/PP) were obtained through melt mixing using a high-intensity thermokinetic mixer and were subsequently injected. The recycled composites exhibited decreased tensile strength relative to the original composites. However, when thermal stabilizers were added, the mechanical properties were maintained or increased, depending on the fiber and additive types.

The aim of this work is to propose a methodology to estimate the fatigue limit of cylindrical contacts under a partial slip regime. Taylor’s point stress method, usually applied to estimate fatigue limit for notched structures, was associated with the Modified Wöhler Curves to define the fretting crack initiation threshold methodology. Twenty-nine tests on cylindrical contacts were selected from the literature and considered to evaluate the quality of the estimates. The results agree well for twenty-three experimental data. As the fatigue limit under fully reversed bending is the fatigue parameter usually available for most metallic alloys, it was also showed how the second fatigue limit needed to calibrate the proposed procedure could be estimated by taking full advantage from other standard predictive methodologies previously devised to estimate the mean stress effect under uniaxial fatigue loading.