Reinventing the Wheel

Zhi Hao Zuo1

e-mail: zhihao.zuo@rmit.edu.au

Yi Min Xie
e-mail: mike.xie@rmit.edu.au

Xiaodong Huang
e-mail: huang.xiaodong@rmit.edu.au School of Civil, Environmental and Chemical Engineering, RMIT University, GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001, Australia

A rational approach to the mechanical design of wheel rims as a typical periodic structure is presented in the current work. With novel application of the latest bidirectional evolutionary structural optimization method, a procedure is presented for the optimal topological design of wheel rims. Design applications are studied with realistic loads on a general vehicle in various scenarios, where the results not only demonstrate originalities of wheel patterns, but also provide insights into existing wheel designs. The simplicity and generic nature imply the general applicability of the proposed approach to a wide range of wheel designs. DOI: 10.1115/1.4003411 Keywords: wheel rim, topology optimization, bidirectional evolutionary structural optimization (BESO), optimal design, wheel design, periodic structures

solid isotropic material with penalization SIMP method 1,2 , the evolutionary structural optimization ESO method 3,4 , and its new enhanced version the bidirectional ESO BESO 57 . The ESO method was proposed originally in a heuristic manner of gradually removing inefcient material to eventually produce optima, which, however, cannot be guaranteed through mathematical proof 8,9 . Using the power-law material model with binary design variable, Huang et al. 6,10 developed a new convergent and mesh-independent BESO approach that guarantees solid-void type solutions through rigorous optimality criteria. Optimization of the wheel is found in a small number of open literatures, such as Refs. 1113 . However, most of them did not deal with topology optimization, which we address here. A wheel rim simply wheel is a typical rotationally periodic structure; i.e., a wheel is geometrically composed by rotationally duplicating a unique module that is dened as the unit cell. In the current work, by adding a rotationally periodic constraint, the BESO method nds a novel application of optimal topological design of the wheel. Stiffness optimization is demonstrated here under constraints of material usage and layout periodicity. The boundary and loading conditions for a general wheel and various rotational periodic constraints are studied as the input for the nal solutions. A number of optimal designs are given with discussions on insights and improvements of existing designs.

Stiffness Optimization of the Periodic Wheel

Introduction

2.1 Periodic Wheel. In order to fulll the periodicity requirement, the design domain of the wheel is constructed such that it is dividable into unit cells. A cell mode is dened that describes the unit cell division and the number of unit cells. In order to create uniform meshes in all unit cells, the wheel needs to be sweepmeshed into 2D quadrilateral or 3D cubic elements such as the four-unit-cell four-cell example shown in Fig. 1. In the BESO application, the element status is represented by the element relative density that is dened as the binary design variable xij, where i indicates the unit cell number and j the element number within the unit cell. 2.2 Stiffness Optimization of Periodic Structures. Stiffness optimization of periodic structures aims to maximize the structural overall stiffness, i.e., to minimize the mean compliance, under given volume and periodic constraints as follows: Minimize C = 2 UTKU subject to V and x1j = x2j = = xmj and xij = xmin or 1 i = 1 m; j = 1 n 4 periodic constraint 3 xijvij = 0
1

The wheel is probably one of the earliest tools that the human beings began to utilize and has been extended to a wide range of daily life, especially in various vehicles. Through history, people have been making diverse wheel patterns, intuitively and heuristically, according to specic requirements such as manufacturing simplicity and aesthetic acceptability. Modern vehicle design demands safety and comfort for drivers and passengers. This calls for several demanding properties such as the vehicle stiffness. Bearing the vehicle self-weight and the tire pressure, the wheel must be qualied to transmit the loads to the ground, especially in important cases with introduction of extra shear and bending, e.g., full braking is applied. Despite the importance, many modern wheels are still designed with traditional or aesthetical patterns that may or may not be of efciency in practice. It is always benecial for engineers to have insight into the efciency in material usage of existing wheel designs, or to seek improved wheel designs following optimality design criteria. Topology optimization is a powerful tool for mechanical and structural designs by producing optimal layouts, i.e., topologies and shapes. As stiffness is generally the most crucial factor of a structure, topology optimization for stiffness stiffness optimization has been extensively investigated. This problem usually aims to nd the stiffest layout design of the structure under a volume constraint. Several methods are popular in this eld, including the
1 Corresponding author. Contributed by the Design Theory and Methodology Committee of ASME for publication in the JOURNAL OF MECHANICAL DESIGN. Manuscript received February 2, 2010; nal manuscript received December 20, 2010; published online February 8, 2011. Assoc. Editor: Jonathan Cagan.

objective function volume constraint

1 2

where U is the displacement vector, K is the structural stiffness matrix, V is the objective volume, vij is the element volume, m is the total number of unit cells, and n is the total number of elements in one unit cell. The design variable xij is either 1 implying the element presence solid or a minimum xmin close to 0 implying the element absence void . 2.3 Sensitivity Calculation. The element sensitivity calculation in stiffness optimization is much about the element strain energy see Refs. 6,7 for details . In order to obtain meshindependent and convergent solutions, the element sensitivity needs to be processed with lter scheme and history-averaging 5. The synchronized status of the corresponding element group i.e., x1j , x2j , . . . , xmj is demanded as implied in periodic conFEBRUARY 2011, Vol. 133 / 024502-1

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Fig. 1 An example of sweep-meshing a wheel into four unit cells for periodicity

Fig. 3 Sketch of the simulation model of a 2D wheel: geometry and boundary conditions

3
straint equation 3 . Therefore, the processed element sensitivity ij needs to be further averaged see Ref. 14 for details to give the nal element sensitivity as ij = 1 ij m i=1
m

Design Applications of the Wheel

Optimal design of the wheel is demonstrated in both 2D and 3D contexts. The design is initiated according to a common car wheel tted with rubber tire that transmits loads to the wheel. 3.1 Two-Dimensional Application

2.4 Numerical Procedure. Figure 2 describes the procedure of BESO for stiffness optimization of wheels. In this procedure, the computer-aided design CAD software conveniently cooperates with nite element analysis FEA software and a computer program of BESO. It is noted that by adding the rotationally periodic constraint into the well established BESO method, the proposed approach is generally applicable to any structure with rotational periodicity, e.g., see Chapter 9 of Ref. 7 . Further, when setting an appropriate objective function, the proposed method can be used to optimize rotationally periodic structures for any performance other than stiffness, such as deection and natural frequencies 15 .

3.1.1 2D Simulation Model. Figure 3 sketches the design domain for the 2D case. The tire is excluded from the design of the wheel rim. The inner ring is xed on the inner surface, and loads transmitted from the tire are placed on the outer surface of the outer ring. The gray wheel core is the designable area while the other parts of the wheel are dened as nondesignable. Three loads are included: the uniform tire air pressure p1 and the uniform tangential braking traction p2, both over the whole outer ring, and pressure p3 simulating the ground reaction due to the vehicle selfweight. According to Giger and co-worker 12,16 , p3 follows a cosine distribution along the lower half of the outer ring. The loads considered here reect the expected performances of the vehicle, e.g., the loading capacity, the maximum braking deceleration, etc. In two dimensions, p1 is calculated as the thickness of 0.2 m multiplied with the common tire pressure value 220 kPa. p2 is determined by equivalently transferring the ground friction by full braking, taking into account the brake deceleration and overall vehicle mass. p3 is solely determined by the overall vehicle weight. The CAD model is converted into a plane stress nite element FE model. The designable area is discretized into 480 80 quadrilateral elements with unit thickness. The nondesignable area is discretized into a total of 2960 quadrilateral elements for the inner and outer rings. The material dened is the conventional steel, i.e., Youngs modulus is 2 1011 Pa and Poissons ratio is 0.3. 3.1.2 Optimization Parameters. The objective volume fraction is set 40%; i.e., 40% material of the designable area will remain in the nal design. Several cell modes from 5-cell to 24-cell are tried. Note that increasing the unit cell numbers implies decreasing the unit cell size; smaller structural members are needed to describe the wheel layout. On the other hand, in the lter scheme 5 , the lter radius rmin affects the nal structural member size. Therefore the lter radii are set decreased as cell mode increases: rmin = 3.0 cm for 5-cell to 8-cell, rmin = 2.0 cm for 12-cell and 17-cell, and rmin = 2.0 cm for 24-cell. 3.1.3 Optimization Results. Three cases are considered with different vehicle masses and braking decelerations in this application. In the rst case, the overall car mass is 1000 kg, and the braking stops the car at the speed of 100 km/h within 3 s, which makes 9.26 m / s2 deceleration. After calculation, the rst set of loads is determined: p1 = 44,000 N / m, p2 = 4875.6 N / m, and p3,max = 6637.1 N / m. Similarly, the second load set is taken as p1 = 44,000 N / m, p2 = 9751.2 N / m, and p3,max = 13274.2 N / m; and the third load set as p1 = 44,000 N / m, p2 = 9751.2 N / m, and Transactions of the ASME

Fig. 2 Flowchart of BESO procedure for wheel optimization

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Fig. 6 Improvement of an existing wheel: evolutionary history

Fig. 4 2D wheel designs for selected cell modes under three load sets

p3,max = 6637.1 N / m. Some selected results are presented in Fig. 4. With the same cell modes, the spokes are more inclined to support the larger tangential traction p2. However, the nal designs tend to be similar across different load sets when a large cell mode is involved. The reason is that the periodic constraint becomes more important in the optimization problem with the cell mode increasing, and thus the solution difference caused by different loads becomes less. Still, it is expected that more optimal wheel designs are obtained when various cell modes and loads are applied. Figure 5 a shows the CAD designs that have been processed from the 17-cell and 24-cell nal solutions with boundary ttings. Note that for the 17-cell solution a particular FE mesh 544 90 is used so that the FE model can be accurately divided into 17 unit cells. It is signicant to nd that these two solutions possess high correspondence with the existing 17-cell BMW and 24cell Cadillac FWD wheels shown in Fig. 5 b . The similarities imply that the two existing wheels comply to a large extent with the optimal material distribution for maximum overall stiffness. Figure 6 shows the improvement of a 5-cell car wheel of fashion. The wheel is simulated in the same 2D design domain under

Fig. 7 CAD model of the ten-cell optimal design of the 3D wheel: a front view of the whole wheel and b perspective view of the wheel core

the third load set. The graph shows the evolutionary history of mean compliance reduction until the nal convergence. Interestingly during the history, the intermediate design at Iteration 11 happens to be similar to another real wheel, which was later outperformed by the nal solution. With nearly the same amount of material volume fraction: 39.2% versus 40.0% , about 58% mean compliance reduction is nally achieved. 3.2 Three-Dimensional Application. A 3D application is briey demonstrated here. Except for loads p1 p3 introduced in the previous 2D application, one needs to take into account the load due to change in the vehicle direction. This load is decomposed into a surface traction and a distributed moment in the third dimension, both assumed to act over the lower half of the wheel and follows the distribution as Giger and co-worker 12,16 . Figure 7 shows the processed CAD model of the optimal solution. This is based on a design domain of 200 71 8 mesh. The depth of the wheel core allows for the emergence of the upper and lower anges and of the small structural members in the web. This is a typical conguration of components of an optimal cantilever resisting the bending effect that in this case is induced by the ground reaction due to changing the vehicle direction.

Conclusions

Fig. 5 CAD models of the optimal solutions and comparison with existing wheel designs: a the 17-cell and 24-cell optimal designs, and b the corresponding 17-cell BMW wheel and the 24-cell alloy wheel for a Cadillac FWD

This work reveals a novel application of BESO in topological design. By introducing a rotational periodic constraint, the well established BESO method is applied to the optimal design of the wheel. The proposed wheel design procedure involves the usage of commercial CAD and FEA software, and a computer program of BESO developed by the authors.2 In the demonstrated design applications concerning the overall stiffness of the wheel, original optimal wheel solutions are obtained according to prescribed cell modes and realistic loadings. Through comparison, insights into some existing wheel designs are also provided. The proposed ap2

See http://isg.rmit.edu.au.

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proach is generally applicable to all wheel designs when setting appropriate design objectives. More generally, this approach is extendable to design of all structures with rotationally periodic patterns.

Acknowledgment
The authors wish to acknowledge the nancial support from the Australian Research Council Project No. DP1094401 for carrying out this work.

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