Design and Analysis of Wheel Rim Using Composite Materials and Carbon Fibres

Abstract

The wheel is a very crucial part of a vehicle. It supports the whole weight of the vehicle. Therefore, the design of the wheel rim has to be done carefully. Apart from design, the material selection is also a crucial task to be done. The ideal property of rim design material can be high strength, lightweight, low cost, reliable, etc. In this paper, we have discussed a finite element analysis of wheel rim using composite material. The modelling is done in SOLIDWORKS, and analysis is done using ANSYS. Finite element analysis is used to analyse the result because it is a widely used method to calculate stress and deformation when the load does not vary with time (Singh and Saha in IJRET 04:Issue July 2015.eISSN: 2319–1163 | pISSN: 2321–7308, 2015; Batl et al in (2016) Finite element analysis on two wheeler alloy wheel. National conference on progresses and research in mechanical engineering. At Dharwad, India, 2016). The composite materials are lightweight and have high strength, which helps in increasing fuel efficiency. Carbon fibre is an excellent composite material for wheel rim design (Beardmore in J Compos Sci Technol 26: 251–281, 2005). Two types of carbon fibre are taken into consideration that is Epoxy_Carbon_UD_230GPa_Prepreg and Epoxy_Carbon_UD_395GPa_Prepreg. The results are obtained compared with aluminium alloy.