Heavy Duty Truck Air Suspension System Thrust Rod Warm Riveting Structure Design

Heavy duty trucks are important production resources and strategic materials which arealso closely related to the national economic development and the modernization of nationaldefense construction. They are widely used in various fields such as national defenseconstruction and economy and the status and function of which is irreplaceable in the wholeauto industry Therefore, it must be concerned about that the safety of heavy vehicles in thetransport process.Balance suspension system is designed for weakening vibration during moving processwhich can improve the stability and comfort and protect the road in the driving process. Ingeneral, link mechanism consisted of6-8thrust rods cooperated with spring and some steelplaes which applied in balance suspension system can support the external force and torque ofautomobiles. The quality of the thrust rods plays an important role in the safety of in theprocess of the vehicle.There is a high requirement for the parameter precision in the corrugated size andcorrugated quantity of the ball head part, the inner and outer diameter of the aunular tubes,heating temperature and pressure rating of the press.In this paper, the thermal riveting structure between the ball head of the thrust rod andthe sleeve was optimized, the comprehensive performance of the thrust rods was improvedafter warm riveting, the requirement of mechanical assembly in riveting position of the thrustrod was finished. Meanwhile, invalidation problem of thrust rod caused by bad rivetingsituation was solved and high performance thrust rod was obtained.In this paper, relativelymature finite element method was applied to optimize the process of warm riveting in thrustrod and predict the failure. Detailed contents are as follows:(1)Stress analysis in the tubers of thrust rod riveting position was conducted by physicalmodeling analysis and the failure mode of the riveting position was analyzed; (2)Pretreatment analysis composed of two parts containing materials selected, boundarycondition and applied load size was proceeded in the finite element software. The finiteelement analysis model of the riveting part was finally obtained and the force strainnephogram as well as the numerical were calculated.(3)The original riveting structure was optimized and the optimization solution wasproposed according to the finite element analysis results;(4)The best improvement project was obtained after calculating the optimized scheme.Conves occlusion was changed into a shape of cone or trapezoid based on the originalthrust rod riveting part. Three kinds of seed solution containing modification of conical taperand angle between bottom and side in trapezoid were proposed. All the six projects were usedto change the structures of the original thrust rod riveting parts, so there is a direct affection ofdifferent conical taper in the riveting position under the same applied load.The riveting situation of thrust rods imposed directly on the whole fatigue life of thethrust rods and the safety of heavy duty truck in operation. The content of this paper involvesthe optimization of warm riveting structure and finite element analysis in riveting of thrustrods which provides the theoretical foundation for research and application promotion ofthrust rod warm riveting.