PSI - Issue 75

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect Structural Integrity Procedia (2025) 000 – 000

www.elsevier.com/locate/procedia

ScienceDirect

Procedia Structural Integrity 75 (2025) 299–310

Fatigue Design 2025 (FatDes 2025) Fatigue life of wheels regarding design and test constraints

Said Allouch, Christoph Bleicher, Ivo Krause, Jayesh Tank Fraunhofer Institute for Structural Durability and System Reliability, Darmstadt, Hessen, Germany

© 2025 The Authors. Published by ELSEVIER B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0) Peer-review under the responsibility of Dr Fabien Lefebvre with at least 2 reviewers per paper Abstract Wheels both for passenger cars and commercial vehicles are one of the most safety critical parts on vehicles. Knowing this, in the 1970’s automotive industry started to rethink the design and also the lifetime assessment of wheels with respect to their dif ferent use case scenarios. Detailed measurements revealed the load influences from on- and off-road usage also including special and extreme load events. At that time, the BiAx or ZWARP test technology for rotating components of wheel ends were developed using these real-life measurements to achieve a realistic fatigue assessment for any kind of wheel or hub in a lab environment. In the last years, the demands for the fatigue assessment have developed both with the variety of wheels and the usage itself. Especially, with regard to wheel and tire sizes as well as wheel test technology new demands from the customer side open up new r esearch demands to assess the wheel’s strength. To detect the influences of fatigue test methods, the wheel and also the tire size intense fatigue investigations at Fraunhofer LBF were conducted. The aim was to derive the significances influencing the fatigue result and the parameters driving the fatigue assessment of passenger car and truck wheels. The investigations showed that these parameters have significant influence on the local loads on the wheel and thus on the local fatigue strength. This needs to be taken into account for the lifetime assessment and the fatigue validation procedure to ensure a safe and reliable product. © 2025 The Authors. Published by ELSEVIER B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0) Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the Fatigue Design 2025 organizers Keywords: Type your keywords here, separated by semicolons ; 1. Introduction Several million cars and trucks are brought into use in Europe every year (Lahiri, 2025). In the systems many safety critical components in the suspension system and the chassis are under specific interest for structural durability. Besides this, the safety of wheels is crucial for the complete integrity of the car or truck. In addition to the economics aspects, the reliability of safety components, which includes the wheel assembly, must have top priority. While in the resent decades mostly steel wheels were used in a more or less same configuration and design, customers strive to individualize their cars with wheels made of light alloys like aluminum or magnesium. Further diversifications on passenger car wheels arise from the scaled design to different wheel sizes, tire ratios and tire width. 2452-3216 © 2025 The Authors. Published by ELSEVIER B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0) Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the Fatigue Design 2025 organizers

2452-3216 © 2025 The Authors. Published by ELSEVIER B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0) Peer-review under the responsibility of Dr Fabien Lefebvre with at least 2 reviewers per paper 10.1016/j.prostr.2025.11.031