Finite Element Analysis And Fatigue Life Prediction Of Automotive Steel Wheel

The wheel is an important part of the automobile car, the forces between theground and the car are translated by the wheel, so the quality of the wheel directlydetermine the driver's life safe. When the car is driving on the ground, a random loadwith variable amplitude called fatigue load will be applied circularly on the wheel.Under this cyclic loading, the fine crack can be appeared which would expand slowlyuntil the wheel is failed. According to the statistics, eighty percent of the destroyedwheels are caused by fatigue load. So it has a great significance to study the fatigueperformance of the wheel.According to the requirements of the GB/T5909-2009?Performancerequirements and test methods of commercial vehicles wheels?, this paper appliedAbaqus in building the static finite element model of the13×4.5B automotive steelwheel and then to calculate the wheel's fatigue life by Fatigue. The result proved thatuse the FEA method can apparently promote the efficiency during the designing of thesteel wheel. In this paper, the different forces that the steel wheel accepts from theground when the car is worked and how these forces influence the steel wheel'sfatigue performance are discussed first. Then mesh the steel wheel with Hypermeshusing the appropriate size and import the meshes model into Abaqus to analysis thewheel's static stress on the bending fatigue and radial fatigue conditions based on thetest require. In the bending fatigue analysis, two models that one is with boltpretension and another without bolt pretension have been established. Compare theresults of the two models it can conclude that the bolt pretension has little influenceon steel wheel's static stress, so in order to improve the efficiency of finite elementanalysis it can ignore the influence of the bolt pretension. In this paper the influenceof the air pressure in the tire on the steel wheel's radial fatigue analysis has beendiscussed, the result show that the air pressure can affect the static stress of the wheel,so in the radial fatigue analysis both the radial load and air pressure must be appliedon the wheel. At the end, compare the FEA result and test result it shows that the tworesults very similar, so it can prove that the FEA method can accurately simulate thewheel's bending and radial fatigue test.The research of this paper is base on the steel wheel and several software of FEAhas been used to finish the steel wheel's static stress analysis and fatigue analysis, andthe result of this research can provide some reference to the wheel's design.