15-11-2014, 03:26 PM
Abstracts: A wheel rim is a highly stressed component in an automobile that is subjected to bending and torsional loads. Because of the long life and high stresses, as well as the need for weight reduction, material and manufacturing process selection is important in rim design. There are competitions among materials and manufacturing processes, due to cost performance, and weight. This is a direct result of industry demand for components that are lighter, to increase efficiency, and cheaper to produce, while at the same time maintaining fatigue strength and other functional requirements. To improve the quality of aluminum wheels, a new method for evaluating the fatigue life of aluminum wheels is proposed in that paper. The ABAQUS software was used to build the static load finite element model of aluminum wheels for rotary fatigue test. Using the method proposed in this paper, the wheel life cycle was improved to over 1.0×105 and satisfied the design requirement. The results indicated that the proposed method of integrating finite element analysis and nominal stress method was a good and efficient method to predict the fatigue life of aluminum wheels. In this paper, for predicting the wheel fatigue life, the nominal stress method was integrated into the CAD / CAE technology to simulate the rotary fatigue test. In addition, an actual prototype of the test was done to verify the analysis. In the rotary fatigue test, a wheel was spun to bear a moment to simulate the process of turning corner continued the wheel’s ability bearing the moment, a wheel was mounted on a rotating table. A shaft was attached to the center of the wheel where a constant normal force was applied