Approach to Evaluate and Design the Wheel Bearings for High Performance Vehicles

High-performance vehicle wheel bearings experience high lateral loading during racetrack testing. Due to higher loads, the wheel bearings are more susceptible to structural and or preload failures. Structural failures can occur in the hub flange, spline and/or roll form. The increased loading and cycling requirements, drives the need to adjust historical evaluation methods. The wheel bearing design for a high-performance vehicle must find the optimum balance between strength, drag, packaging, and mass. The objective of this paper is to cover the methodology to evaluate wheel bearings using the predicted loads before the actual vehicle testing. Initially, the predicted load data consists of many data points and is not suitable for either CAE analysis and/or physical testing. This paper is planned to cover the approach to condense the large number of short duration steps into small number of large duration steps which can be used for CAE and bench test evaluations without changing the severity of the load cycle. This paper will cover the possible failure modes with high lateral load application and design approaches that possibly can mitigate the failures.