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The objective of this project is to reduce the weight of a wheel without affecting its primary functions such as fitment, air flow and fatigue life, the design is made with the concept of variable thickness, meaning reducing thickness wherever the stresses are low and also addressing the failures in the field. However, requirement of a prototype makes the validation process laborious, costly and time consuming. Finite Element Method (FEM) has evolved as a resourceful tool for analyzing various components under a variety of operating conditions. It is being used not only to predict the critical points bearing the highest stress in a wheel, but also to predict its fatigue life. The present study focuses on the design of variable thickness disc and validation of the same using FEM for air flow analysis and Rig testing. The analysis was carried out on existing and proposed designs and the salient features were compared.

In Automotive, Steel wheels are exponentially replaced by Aluminum wheels because of its feather light, agile performance and better acceleration. One such widely used size is 11.75 x 22.5 wheels for trucks and trailer segment. During the design stage of 11.75 x 22.5 wheel, the valve hole was placed away from the stress concentration zone to reduce the stress on the holes and also the design was validated through all conventional wheel rim testing methodologies (Like CFT, RFT and Bi-axial) and the wheel passed all the test requirements. During the field trials, failures were observed on the valve holes, despite of this hole was away from stress concentration region. Understood from the field trials that, the regular testing was not able to simulate the real field conditions for this particular size and changed the boundary condition in our FEA to simulate the actual conditions. After changing the boundary conditions, we could able to observe more stress in valve hole.