A simulation method of wheel biaxial fatigue test for passenger cars using external drum

Compared to radial and cornering fatigue tests, the biaxial fatigue test more accurately reproduces the in-service stress state of a wheel by applying simultaneous radial and lateral loads. This study proposes a novel finite element simulation method for passenger car wheels, incorporating both tyre dynamic rolling via steady-state transport analysis and the effect of tyre-wheel interference fit. The method is applied to a composite aluminium alloy wheel with different materials for the spoke and rim. Results indicate that stress distributions from the proposed and a simplified method are similar. However, the proposed method yields a higher maximum rim stress by up to 25.684% under certain loads, which is closer to the measured results by referring to the literature. This indicates that the proposed method is able to provide more accurate strength evaluation results of the passenger car wheel in biaxial fatigue test.