Structural Design of the Outer Tie Rod for an Electrical Vehicle

Abstract

Outer tie rod is lighter than other, but there is the trend item weight and the number is increasing due to vehicle performance improvement. Thus, to improve vehicle fuel efficiency, weight lightening is essential. Therefore, this research performed the finite element analysis to investigate the structural performance of the outer tie rod for an electrical vehicle. This study was performed as the preliminary study for a lightweight design of the outer tie rod. The weight of outer tie rod was optimized by adopting the steel material and applying the trial and error method. The strengths due to durability and buckling should be considered in the structural design of an outer tie rod. Furthermore, the meta model-based optimization was applied to obtain its lightweight design, leading to 9 % weigh reduction.

Lightweight Design of an Outer Tie Rod for an Electrical Vehicle

“…As a sampling method, the Latin hypercube design built into Matlab was utilized. In this step, the number of sample points was 50, which was determined by experience [2,3,5,6]. Second, FE analysis using the Abaqus [6] was performed, with a number of sample points.…”

“…where x = [ 1 2 3 4 ] , x = [0 ∘ 0 ∘ 0 mm 0 mm] , x = [9.0 ∘ 3.0 ∘ 15.0 mm 2.0 mm] , is the weight of the aluminum OTR, is its buckling load, and 0 is the allowable value. Shape optimization based on the sensitivity information makes the setting of a shape variable difficult and distorts the finite elements in the optimization process [2,3,5,6]. In addition, a number of nonlinear analyses are performed in an optimization process to solve (1)∼(3), and the iterations may not be terminated.…”

“…There are methods that generate a surrogate model, such as a response surface model, kriging, a neural network, and others. The present research utilizes the kriging metamodel, suitable for prediction of a highly nonlinear function [5,6]. When an approximate model is used, the objective and constraint functions in (1)∼ (2) can be replaced as follows:…”

“…It is known that the kriging metamodel provides accurate predictions of highly nonlinear responses. The design process using the kriging metamodel is as follows [6,7]. First, the DOE using Latin hypercube design is carried out, to define the design samples.…”