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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.

A “WHEEL” is one of those auto component in a vehicle which necessitates equal attention from safety, ergonomics and aesthetic perspectives. A conventional tube type wheel for commercial vehicles is made of steel with steel side rings (multi-piece construction). In course as headway in wheel design the single piece wheels were developed which used the tubeless tires. These wheels were made available in both steel and aluminum versions. Wherein the aluminum wheels were lighter in weight than steel, aesthetically more appealing and had other significant advantages. Despite the advantages of these tubeless tire wheels, the end user had to invest for both wheels and tubeless tires to replace conventional tube type steel wheels. The retro-fitment calls for higher exchange cost of wheel and tire and this process stands to be more capitalistic to the end user wherein the payback period was longer.