Lightweight Design Of Alloy Wheel Hubs(CAE)

With the increasingly tense energy and environmental pollution，vehicle fueleconomy is further paid attention to by the automobile manufacturing industry andconsumers. And lightweight is one of the most important development directions ofvehicle. As an important safety component of vehicle, the weight of wheel hub shouldbe reduced to capacity in order to improve fuel economy, which is on the premise ofenough strength. Traditional wheel manufacturing process is conducted on the basis ofmuch design experience, and the production cycle is long and expensive. In recentyears, CAE is widely used in the lightweight design of wheel hub.The wheel hub is the research object of this paper. After topology optimization inANSYS which is in order to determine the spoke shape, the wheel hub model isestablished parametrically. According to the national standard GB/T5334-2005,bending, radial and impact test analysis is carried out on the wheel hub to strengthcheck. Then checking analysis under the working condition of vehicle climbing isadded and modal analysis of bending test model and impact test model is used toobtain the model natural frequency. Based on DTM module of ANSYS/LS-DYNA,impact dynamic analysis and strength check are accomplished. At last, all analysismodules are parameterized for the modular call.On the basis of the above work, the stress dangerous points are analyzed and sizeoptimization is carried out in which the optimization variables are spoke thickness, rimthickness and the radius of transition arc. After checking the strength of the optimizedmodel, the result shows that the quality of the new model is8.44kg, which is lighterthan the original quality by8%，and the expected purpose is achieved. Therefore, theoptimization method in this paper can provide a reference to improve the vehicle fueleconomy.