Clamping method improvement for preventing the return hose oil leakage by elastoplastic finite element analysis

The clamping of the return hose to the gearbox pipe end is important to prevent the oil leakage from the automotive hydraulic power steering system. In this context, this paper is concerned with the improvement of the current clamping method using a thin circular steel strip to resolve the oil leakage phenomenon. The clamping of gearbox pipe end and rubber hose by tightening a thin circular steel strip is replaced with the swaging of a circular metal sleeve. For the current and improved clamping methods, the distributions of effective stress, effective strain, and normal contact pressure at the interface between pipe and rubber hose are analyzed and compared by utilizing the elastoplastic finite element analysis. As well, the durability test for verifying the oil leakage-proof performance of the improved method is performed at the level of return hose assembly. It is observed from the numerical analysis and experiment that the return hose oil leakage is successfully resolved by improving the clamping method.