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Lightweight design is a key factor in general engineering design practice, however, it often conflicts with fatigue durability. This paper presents a way for improving the effectiveness of fatigue performance dominated optimization, demonstrated through a case study on suspension brackets for heavy-duty vehicles. This case study is based on random load data collected from fatigue durability tests in proving grounds, and fatigue failures of the heavy-duty vehicle suspension brackets were observed and recorded during the tests. Multi-objective fatigue optimization was introduced by employing multiaxial time-domain fatigue analysis under random loads combined with the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II with archives.

In this paper, an equivalent conversion method is proposed to apply the six-dimensional force road spectrum of the four-axle vehicle on the same platform to the three-axle through the axle load comparison. Further, the feasibility of the devolved equivalent conversion method is verified, and the fatigue performance improvement of the wishbone support structure of a commercial vehicle is finally achieved. Specifically, firstly, the load spectrum at each attachment point of the suspension for the three-axle vehicle is obtained through the iteration of the multi-body dynamic model. Furthermore, the finite element model of the suspension for the three-axle vehicle is established; the analysis of fatigue life for the suspension structure is performed by extracting stress amplitude through the multi-axis cyclic counting method and calculating equivalent force amplitude through McDiarmid’s criterion, combined with the SN curve of the material.