Lightweight Research On Automobile Drive Axle Housing

With the rapid development of China's economy and the comprehensive establishment of the transportation system,the Chinese automotive industry is developing faster and faster,and consumers are increasingly demanding the performance of automobiles.Therefore,it is impossible for major automobile manufacturers to only require efficient production capacity of automobiles,and at the same time,the performance of automobiles must be continuously improved to achieve stable development of enterprises.Under the premise,major domestic automakers continue to launch new projects,mainly to develop new cars that meet market demand for automotive performance.As an important part of the automobile chassis,the automobile drive axle housing reasonably designs the automobile drive axle housing to meet its sufficient strength,rigidity and safety factor,and is the main measure to verify the safety and smoothness of the automobile.In this paper,the drive axle housing of Steyr 91 series heavy-duty truck is taken as the research object.Based on the performance analysis of strength,stiffness,modal characteristics and fatigue life,the lightweight research is carried out.Firstly,according to the two-dimensional engineering drawing of the automobile drive axle housing,the three-dimensional solid drawing is carried out in the software CATIA,and the force characteristics of the automobile driving axle housing are analyzed,and four different working conditions are obtained,according to different work.The load is calculated separately,and the three-dimensional model is simplified to prepare for the establishment of the finite element model.Secondly,the finite element analysis of the axle housing is carried out by means of the finite element analysis software ANSYS Workbench.According to the different conditions,the static analysis,modal analysis and fatigue life analysis are carried out on the bearing shell.The strength and stiffness were verified separately,as well as the joint mode shape and fatigue life value.It can be inferred that there is further lightweight space in the axle housing.Thirdly,when the axle housing is lightened,a combination of topology optimization and multi-objective optimization is proposed.By using the topology optimization software solidThinking Inspire to optimize the topology of the rear axle housing of the car and reconstruct the model with CATIA,and verify whether the reconstruction model meets the requirements.Then,for the topology-optimized reconstruction model,the sensitivity analysis is carried out,and the wall thickness,half-shaft casing thickness and bridge package thickness of the bridge shell body are selected as design variables,and the optimal Latin square sampling test is established.The optimization software,combined with the Kriging approximation model,uses genetic algorithms to optimize the multi-objective of the rear axle housing,which ultimately reduces the weight of the axle housing by 28.19 kg.Finally,the finite element analysis of the lightweight structure is compared with the calculation results before the lightweighting,and the fatigue life of the structure is calculated,and the lightweight structure is verified to meet the usage requirements,and the proposed lightweighting is verified.The method is implementable.