CAE Analysis And Optimization Of An Articulated Dump Truck’s Drive Axle

Good driving ability and the ability to adapt to working in all kinds of bad weatherand road conditions is very important for articulated dump truck, drive axle as one of thekey components of an articulated dump truck, it not only need to meet the drive ability ofnormal work in the complex conditions, and the stiffness and strength of drive axle is alsoparticularly important. Drive axle housing not only need to protect the final drive,differential and half shaft parts, but also is the key bearing parts. It has to bear the forcefrom the working process of the internal system, and also carry the force and moment indifferent conditions by wheel transmission. In the development process of the drive axle,not only need to validate the safety and reliability of the housing, and transmission systemanalysis is also significant. Meanwhile, the methods can reduce the cost to improve theeconomic benefit and ensure product quality becomes each enterprise’s main goal, and inorder to accomplish this goal, the structure optimization design method during thelightweight design process is a good method. CAE technology can greatly shorten thedevelopment cycle of the drive axle, reduce development costs and improve the designquality.First of all, virtual prototype model of the drive axle transmission system isestablished in RomaxDesigner. The Finite Element Method is employed to model thehousing in order to include the housing stiffness and inertial effects on the deflection of thewhole system. Transmission system characteristics are evaluated after the systematicanalysis.The bearing forces under different load cases are got from the Romax simulationresults for housing strength calculation, combined with external loads of the housing, thestiffness and strength model for drive axle housing calculation by the pre-processorsoftware which so called Hypermesh. After that, a detailed FE model is establishedincluding the bolt pretension and contact to get more accuracy results. The FE results showthat the stiffness of housing can meet the Chinese standard, however, the strength of thehousing is insufficient, the drive axle structure need to strengthen.Finally, the drive axle housing is restructured after the design of topologyoptimization for the old housing, and the new design strength is verified by Abaqus as well.The Abaqus results show that the new housing has improved the performance of thestrength of the drive axle and reduced the material of the housing as well. It is a strong support for the structure design.