The Light-Weight Design And Development Of A Light Off-road Vehicle's Rear Axle Housing

In today's globalization of energy-saving and environmental protection,with the continuous development of the automotive technology,light-weight has become an important design principle which the majority of off-road car manufacturers should deal with the new national oil consumption laws and regulations.Rear assembly is considered as an key part of the automotive transmission system,its performance and lightweight are more and more concerned.The paper aims at a light off-road vehicle rear axle housing as research object,through the design calculation,finite element analysis and engineering test,it is designed for light-weight for achieving the expected goals.In this paper,the rear axle housing of a light off-road vehicle under development was studied.Based on the structure of the rear axle housing body,the rear axle housing was carried out according to the structural optimization,process optimization and material optimization,light-weight design.Through the method of topological optimization,the rear axle housing body,the rear axle housing cover and the rear axle housing tube were integrated together to optimize the rear axle housing into an integral structure.Based on the structure of the integral rear axle housing,the stamping process was optimized to improve the product manufacturability.Based on the structural optimization of the rear axle housing and the process optimization,the material optimization was carried out.According to the design experiences and calculation results of similar models,the 3D mathematical model of the integral rear axle housing assembly which meets the requirements of light-weight design was established by using CATIA software.The mesh was also divided by Hypermesh software,the vertical bending stiffness and vertical bending stiffness of the rear axle housing were calculated by traditional calculation formulas and some mainly CAE analysis software such as MSC.Nastran?ABAQUS?ANSYS/Workbench and so on.Through the FEA,and according to the analysis results of stress and deformation,to determine whether the structure of the rear axle housing needs further optimization,the 3D mathematical model needs further correction.Based on the design calculation and the 3D mathematical model's FEA,the physical prototype manufacturing,rear axle housing bench test,rear axle housing equipped with a vehicle to simulate the vehicle road test and vehicle reliability road test were carried out to verify the effectiveness and consistency of the light-weight rear axle housing structure to achieve the purpose of light-weight.In the actual development process,the design and calculation of the integral rear axle housing was compared with the three-stage rear axle housing,so did the CAE analysis and bench test results.The test results show that under the prerequisite that the strength and performance of the rear axle housing meet the requirements,the.weight reduction of 1kg was achieved by the light-weight design,which proves the feasibility of light-weight design and development of the rear axle housing.The forming simulation analysis was carried out according to the 3D mathematical model.The forming simulation of the rear axle housing was carried out by Autoform and Dynaform softwares,and the possibility of further reducing the weight of the rear axle housing by hydroforming was predicted.