Author : Joijode Vrushabh Umesh and Yadav Abhishek

In a Formula Student Car or in any car as such, the part that connects the main frame of the body with the wheels through suspension arms is known as the Wheel Assembly. It is a part of the Final drive as well. While designing and developing any automobile the designing of the wheel assembly is critical. It is due to the reason that a lot of forces are acting on the wheel assembly during accelerating, braking, cornering and tilting. Furthermore, the Wheel Assembly is an important part of an automobile and its failure is hazardous endangering human life. Therefore is required to design the Wheel Assembly and its components considering all the factors leading to the failure by developing a safe Design. It must also be noted that, the components must be designed in such a way that they have a minimum weight at the same time care must be taken that they do not cross a certain limit of stress value. In this Paper the Complete Design Procedure of the Wheel Assembly for R12 Rims with wet Tires (165×60) has been presented along with optimization of the same components. The weight of the Vehicle is considered to be 300 kg along with the driver. The paper illustrates the forces acting on the components, the failure criteria and the optimization of the components. Optimization has been carried out by doing analysis of the components in Hyper mesh. The paper deals with finding out the dimensions of the individual components and also detecting the probable regions of stress concentration. The Wheel Assembly designed in the paper is of Team Veloce, VIT, Pune. The design procedure follows all the rules laid down by FSAE Rule Book for Formula Type Cars.

Keywords: Yield Strength, Factor of safety, Load transfer, stress concentration, mesh, element size, analysis.