FEA of Solid Model of Automotive Hub

[wildboar]

I have a meshed model of a vehicle wheel hub and i am thinking of applying vehicle loads via an RBE3 spider from axel centre to the bearing contact surface on the hub.I have linear beam elements going from the RBE3 to the Tire Contact Patch position.
Any thoughts on where to best restrain the model.I am thinking of restraining the model at the wheel bolt hole positions.
Any opinions on this?

 

[gurmeet2003]

wildboar,

If you are unsure about the best location to constrain a model try a few different approaches and look at the animation of the resulting deformed shape. I have found this to be very valuable in deciding if a particular set of constraints is realistic or not.

Gurmeet

 

[sean01]

Wildboar,

I did a similar thing to this for a railway wheel recently and this is the approach I used -

Firstly I only modelled a quarter of the wheel - since it was rotationally symmetrical - there didn't seem to be any need to do any more. For your problem - you might want to do a half circle though

Next I constrained the part at the start and end points of the quadrant (or half circle) these were represented using SPCs.

Finally, I applied loads using a circular co-ordinate system around the peripheral edge of the quadrant (or half circle !) When doing this though - I realised that the loads at the SPC points had to be altered, otherwise the resulting stress contour would be unrealistic (this is obvious when the plot is viewed as the stress distribution was uneven) In my case, for the load I considered, the load at the SPCs had to be halved.

Gurmeets idea of trying a couple of different methods is a good idea and comparing the resulting animations is a good one as well though, as it makes you interpret the results and question whether or not they are right though !! There can be a tendency sometimes to believe that just because it has come out of computer - it must be right !!!

Hope this helps


sean