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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.

Overheating in commercial vehicles, even though if it’s in LCV segment, is a problem of high significance. There could be various level of problems that may arise due to heat generation resulting from braking (oversized brake drums left the wheels with lesser packaging clearances for air flow and cooling) and some of them are: 1. Early tire wear /reduction in tire life, 2. Air valve heat damage /air leak issues, 3. Frequent puncture problems, 4. Failure of other mating components and other heat initiated failures. However optimum the vent hole shape in a wheel may be, the air flow in the vicinity of drum periphery and wheel rim ID wouldn’t be sufficient enough because of the lesser clearance and packaging space as mentioned earlier. The basic construction of a wheel with disc welded to rim base ID was apparently modified to integrate the disc and gutter and weld it to rim OD.