The Analysis And Research On The Weight-light Design Of The PHEV’s Control Arm

We are paying more attention to the weight-light design of the vehicle and itscomponents, and the control arm’s light weight is very crucial as the main part of vehiclesuspension. The control arm transferring force and leading the direction has a great influenceon the riding and handling stability. The structural strength, rigidity and fatigue etc have to beconsidered as the suspension not only transmit the force and torque between the vehicle bodyand wheels but ensure the car driving in the specific path. Through the analysis to thestructural strength, rigidity and mode, we get the weight-light structure with keeping theperformance.The paper is based on the PHEV’s weight-light project, integrately use the multi-bodydynamics, finite elements and structural optimization method to study the control arm. Firstly,we build the multi-body dynamics model to attain the boundary load, then using the load toanalyse the control arm’s structural strength and mode. Secondly, based on the results of theoriginal structure,the paper adopt the compromising topology optimization method tooptimize the control arm, with the mass-fraction constraint and the function equationobjective. In addition, we choose the optimal index weight ratio and conduct the finiteelement analysis to the new model on the basis of a contrastive analysis to the optimizationresults in different index weight ratio. Then, to make a contrastive analysis to the newmodel’s structural strength, rigidity and modal, the result shows that the optimized controlarm has a better performance with light weight. Lastly, the paper makes a fatigue analysis tothe optimized model in the Ncode software, adopting the S-N method, and the new modelshows good reliability and durability.The paper adopts the compromising topology optimization method to improve theperformance index of the control arm, meanwhile realize the light weight aim.