The Wheel Attachment in Transition Towards E-Mobility

The change towards electrified powertrains in passenger cars leads to increased material utilization of chassis components and especially chassis attachments. The wheel attachment is no exception, facing e.g. increase of axle loads, wheel dimensions, cornering loads due to tire grip and center of gravity improvements. At the same time lightweight design approaches on its attached components are applied.

The wheel attachment has a special standing due to its increasing dynamic load cases combined with being a “customer interface”. Therefore a reasonable amount of reliability and safety margin is very important, which needs to be tested at an early stage of the development process. The presentation gives an overview on the current changes due to physical and “customer based” requirements, failure modes and suitable test procedures ABC Umformtechnik applies on wheel fasteners to prevent failures. A test & analysis procedure for fastener load measurements is being presented, leading to detailed knowledge of dynamic axial and bending loads in a wheel/chassis fastener at its critical failure area. Also a dynamic fatigue test approach is presented to create fatigue data (Wöhler- curves) of the fastener at dynamic bending loads at constant preload, similar to its real driving dynamic load cases.

This detailed understanding of occurring loads at the fastener itself enables improved safety in all chassis fasteners, by hardware testing and finite element simulation approaches at these same time, leading to improved design processes in an early stage of development.