Research On Lightweight Design Of Aluminum Alloy Motorcycle Rim

Lightweight is one of the hot research fields of the motorcycle industry in the 21 st century. On the premise of guaranteeing safety and usage performance, how to improve the service life and reduce the cost of the motorcycle is the core issue of developing enterprise. To reduce the weight of motorcycle and reduce fuel consumption are the primary measures to solve the core problem. And reduce the weight of the wheel to be much higher than the other part of the motorcycle weight reduce for the fuel economy improvement effect. However, motorcycle wheel is one of the key components in the motorcycle parts. There is no doubt that rim is playing an important role in the safety and reliability of motorcycles and it is incomparable significant for lightweight design of motorcycle. For plants, in addition to some subjective factors can be controlled, the forming technology is not easy to change and transformation, so that the main factors influencing the rim weight is CAE technology after determining the rim materials.The model of the eleven rims were designed by using UG software, and then imported the file to Hyper Mesh software to do mesh generation and exported the file to ANSYS Mechanical APDL. At last, imported into the ANSYS Workbench to analyze the strength. It can be concluded that the most possible fracture position of the rim is the bottom of th e channel section, and the maximum equivalent stress is 413.74 MPa, and the minimum is 386.65 MPa. The section size of the rim structure can be further optimized. Reading these results, you can perorate that the radial load test is rational and scientific, a nd the main design variables of affecting the weight of rim are the height, the thickness and the radius of outer rim.The structure optimal of a rim is calculated by using the UG software and ANSYS Workbench software. The 3D model contained design variables is parameterized with UG software, and then imported to the Workbench soft to optimize. The parameter correlation method is selected to analyse the influence of the input parameters to the output parameters, and the optimization result could be determined manually. The three kinds of optimization methods of the parameter correlation method, the response surface method and the goal driven optimization using MOGA are selected in this paper. The finite element strength analysis of the modified rim were calculated again after making the size to be an integer. And the result shows that the weight of the rim respectively is reduced to 1.67kg、1.64 kg and 1.65 kg from the previous 1.80 kg by adopting the parameter correlation method, the response surface method and the goal driven optimization. Therefore, the weight-loss ratio are 7.19%、8.80% and 8.33% respectively.This design pattern of combining the finite element analysis based on the traditional product development model can not only save the material and reduce the cost for the enterprise, but also can shorten the development cycle of the wheel rim. That is the say that the development of design can effectively guide the design of new rims, has the important theoretical meaning and practical value to shorten the development cycle of the wheel rim.