Abstract

Conventional road wheels made by steel material for defense vehicles are generally easy and cheap in production, but it brings extra, undesirable weight to the platforms. It is found that the use of aluminum for road wheels provides weight gain on tracked land platforms. Generally, common manufacturing techniques for road wheels are casting and forging. Since load spectrum that each tracked vehicle road wheel experiences is considerably high and dynamic, casting may not be a good solution for manufacturing due to lower load absorbing capability of casting products. On the other hand, forging might be a suitable method for dynamically loaded road wheels but, it is also expensive as well due to mold and final machining cost. In this study, aluminum alloy material (2014-T6) produced by flow forming method as an alternative to steel is subjected to numerical and experimental stress and fatigue analysis for being used in road wheels of heavy tracked defense platforms. Flow forming method was utilized for effective, cheap and lighter production. Therefore, main focus was put to see the effect of flow forming method on fatigue behavior of aluminum made road wheels. It was concluded that flow forming production method of aluminum road wheel would be suitable method to provide required low cycle fatigue life with advantageous of cheapness and lightness.

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