Wheel is one of the safety critical components which is being subjected to constant weight reduction but not at the expense of its reliability and durability. The Indian automobiles are subjected to overloading and at the same time endure severe shock loads due to poor road conditions. This forces the vehicle manufacturers to increase the factor of safety on the wheel and also test under severe loading conditions apart from the regulatory requirements and international standard norms.
This makes the wheel manufacturers to design not only for the rated or standard load provided by the vehicle manufacturers but also considering the road conditions and OEM torture track testing requirements. Hence, along with the conventional fatigue tests according to the customer requirement, realistic loading conditions needs to be brought in to testing and virtual simulation.
This present study shows the approach of correlating the functional testing and virtual simulation with the realistic field load condition. This is done by attaining new internal test specifications based on the realistic load data acquired from the field and torture track by instrumenting the wheels. This showed the excellent correlation between the results of virtual testing, experimental stress analysis, realistic load testing and the field performance.