Research On Heavy Steel Wheel Forming Process

Wheel is one of the most important safety parts in vehicle running system. The heavy steel wheel quality greatly affects the security and reliability of the car. Due to the complicated structure, irregular wall-thickness, large forming load, some shortcomings such as tension fracture and crinkle always emerge in the process of molding. The traditional wheel forming process research method" trial and error" relies on experience to determine the process parameters. But it has many disadvantages, such as the blindness in design, the long period, the high cost and so on. It is very hard to clearly understand the forming and process, only depending on theoretical analysis and experimental study. In this paper, the forming process of steel wheel, spinning forming of spoke and roller forming of rim have been analyzed by finite element technology, and the main works having been carried out are as follows:Based on study of steel wheel structure and forming process, on the question of complicated process, low processing efficiency in forming process, the paper proposes forming process numerical simulation method based on DEFORM-3D software for process design and experimental research. Based on the numerical simulation results, the spokes and rim rolling spinning a new improvement process, which can effectively improve the quality of products, shorten the product development cycle.From the spinning processing of theory and reality, the traditional forming process of steel wheel spoke were studied. The curve segment and straight segment of spoke's generatrix have been treated respectively, and stagger spinning has been putted forward. The curved generatrix has been divided into many small sections. With small straight segments instead of curve segment, using the Linear approximation of the thought, curved generatrix can be regarded as set of innumerability conical sections and followed the sine law in generally; The straight section of the spoke belongs to the spinning of tube-spinning. Based on the model established above, the distribution and variation features of the stress and strain during outside spinning of deformation have been obtained. The appropriate process parameters have been selected by basing on the results of the numerical simulation. And analyze the influence of the parameters on spinning force and blank quality; finally obtain a set of optimum process parameters.On the basis of the detailed analysis of the wheel rim roll forming condition and put forward the improvement proposal:the wheel rim rolling form by one step. Based on the proposed scheme, using DEFORM-3D software on the rim of the wheel rolling numerical simulation, discuss reasonable rim a roll forming processing parameters. The simulation results show that it is credible the established rim rolling process simulation modeling method and a forming step numerical simulation. Using orthogonal experiment method for optimizing the process parameters, the group of the most reasonable technological parameters is found which provides a theoretical basis for the production of wheel rim.