Modeling and Optimization for Lightweight Design of Aluminum Alloy Wheel Hub

The excessive increase of fatigue life would lead to wheels getting heavy, which has negative influence in fuel economy, safety and ride comfort of the vehicle. In this paper, the fatigue cycle of aluminum alloy wheel equipped in minibus is calculated firstly under bending, radial, random cycle fatigue conditions. According to the distribution of results, the space parameters of structure optimization are determined. The method combined Latin hyper-cube design and orthogonal experimental design was applied to conduct the design of experiment. The fatigue life of the wheel under the experiment schemes are calculated respectively. Response surface multi-objective optimization model of the wheel is established based on fatigue life results. The genetic algorithm is applied to optimize the wheel, which causes the mass of aluminum alloy wheel reduces 13.85% and first order modal value increases 7.6%.