Finite element analysis of the residual stress of automotive wheel made of long glass fiber-reinforced thermoplastic composite

Abstract

To increase the simulation accuracy, a finite element analysis method for the prediction of the residual stress distribution in the injection molded wheel made of the long glass fiber-reinforced thermoplastic composite (LGFT) is studied, and a simulation method of the wheel bending fatigue test considering the residual stress distribution is investigated in this paper. First, the in-cavity residual stress is calculated using the molding simulation method. Then the residual stress relaxation process is analyzed and the final residual stress distribution is obtained. With the residual stress as the initial stress, the structural simulation of the LGFT wheel under the bending load is performed. To evaluate the influence of the residual stress on the LGFT wheel, an additional simulation without considering the residual stress is conducted. The result shows that the interior stress considering residual stress is much higher than that without considering residual stress. To verify the simulation accuracy of these two cases, the high-stress area locations in the simulation results are compared with the damage locations in physical bending fatigue test. The result illustrates that the simulation result considering the residual stress accords with the experimental result better. Therefore, the simulation result of the residual stress is reasonable, and it is necessary to consider residual stress in the simulation of the LGFT wheel.