A novel numerical method for quantifying the combined effect of tire on 13-degree impact test of automotive wheels made of lightweight materials

One of the technical challenges encountered for automobile wheels made of lightweight materials is whether they can successfully pass the 13-degree impact test. When optimizing the wheel impact resistance through finite element method, the combined effect induced by the tire on this performance can be fully included by introducing the tire model, whereas its strong nonlinear characteristics lead to high computational cost and convergence difficulty. Therefore, to introduce the quantification coefficient for combined effect instead of tire model into the impact simulation model can effectively address above problems. However, the inaccurate quantification coefficient leads to the deviation in the evaluation of wheel impact resistance, which may directly affect the optimization design results. Aiming at these problems, a novel numerical method combining the energy reduction and energy-scaling coefficients is proposed. Firstly, an equivalent simulation model of wheel impact test excluding the tire is obtained by calculating and including the energy reduction coefficient. Then, an adaptive energy-scaling coefficient is constructed and introduced to ensure that the wheel strain status remains unchanged. Finally, the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed method are demonstrated by investigating two types of wheels. The results show that the proposed method can serve as an efficient tool during optimizing the impact resistance, not only improving the computational efficiency and convergence by excluding the tire model, but also accurately evaluating the wheel impact performance by including the combined effect.