MODELING, SIMULATION AND OPTIMIZATION ANALYSIS OF STEERING KNUCKLE COMPONENT FOR RACE CAR
Light weight and low fuel consumption are the two main demands for a vehicle, particularly for a race car. Steering knuckle, as one of the critical components of a race car, is the main subject in the present study. A light weight and optimized design of steering knuckle is proposed to be used for an EIMARace race car; a small high-performance formula-style car, with suitable material selection as well as valid finite element analysis and optimization studies. First part of this study involves modeling of steering knuckles and analysis of the stresses and displacement under actual load conditions. A CAD and FEA software; SolidWorks, is applied for modeling as well as for static analysis studies. Shape optimization is the second part of this study, utilizing solid Thinking software from Altair Engineering packages. The improved design obtained had achieved 45.8% reduction of mass while meeting the strength requirement.
Fracture Characteristics of Fatigue Failure of a Vehicle’s Ductile Iron Steering Knuckle
The steering knuckle, being a part of the vehicle’s steering and suspension system, undergoes time-varying loading during its service life. Since it is connected to the steering parts and strut assembly from one side and the wheel hub assembly from the other, it has complex restraint and constraint conditions and tolerates a combination of loads. In addition, parameters such as internal defects, stress concentrations and gradients, surface finish, and residual stresses can have considerable influence while designing for fatigue. A vehicle with a 2.500 cm3 (2.5 L) volume engine was being driven during a rainy day in a congested road at a speed of about 10 km/h, when suddenly the vehicle lost its orientation and crushed over a parked vehicle on the right side of the road without any human injury. The driver insisted that he heard an intense noise of a metal undergoing rupture from the front right side of the vehicle’s suspension system and immediately lost control of the vehicle. The producing company of the vehicle on the other hand, after on-site visual inspection, came to the conclusion that due to the driver’s error the vehicle turned to the right and as a consequence of the crash the steering knuckle was broken into two parts. Failure analysis conducted as presented in this article reveals the mechanism of fracture mainly due to bending fatigue.
Structural optimization design for large mirror
Abstract The system design must be started from the concept with low cost and high performance. In this point, the topological shape of the structure is very important in the view of the structural rigidities and light-weight design. In this paper, the optimization methodology is presented in the design stage of the large optical mirror. We obtain the optimal layout through the topology optimization and then design the details through the size or shape optimization for structural rigidity.