Wheel Hub Design

All work indicated below are my own and individual contribution.

Project Overview

The E2 (our 2nd Car) was initiated in 2024. The wheel hubs were components I (as team lead) decided to finish early on, as they are components that significantly affect the suspension’s packaging. What entailed was weeks of extensive literary review, cost estimation, initial designs & iterative optimization.

The 2023 Wheel Hub (Left) & the 2024 Wheel hub (Right)

Highlights

13-piece integrated tripod housing – 1st of its kind

In order to reduce weight & make the assembly as compact as possible, while utilizing a standard commercial FSAE wheel, the tripod housing was integrated into the wheel hub. Whereas other teams achieve this by utilizing a steel hub, 1-liner or 3-liner design, my design comprises of a 6-liner system which is cheaper, lighter & significantly more compact.

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The only 2.5 inch (63.5mm) bearing compatible design

All other hub designs with integrated-tripod housings required bearings with an ID>2.5 inches, unless the whole hub is made of a single material such as steel-which results in a much heavier component if done so.

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57% lighter, Compact & Sealed Custom Bearing-assembly

The bearing assembly, comprises of thin-section angular contact bearings in back-to-back arrangement, a customized & matched spacer made from bearing steel & thin grease seals. The entire assembly weighs less than 300g, whereas the bearings on the previous design (image available at the top of the page) alone weigh 688g.

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Iterative optimization & weight reduction

The hub itself was simulated on ANSYS for stress analyses, followed by a fatigue analysis in order to check if the hub would match the bearings’ service life estimated at 1000km of racing.

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The Results

01

Significant Weight Savings

1,020g saved in each rear assembly, and 460g saved in each front assembly, resulting in a total weight savings of 2.96 kg

02

Significantly lower rolling friction

At the expense of bearing service life, the new wheel bearings require much lower preload (predominantly due to the Class-6 precision ground-and-matched bearing spacer), paired with the inherent properties of AC bearings. resulting in lower resistance compared to the previous 32009 tapered-roller bearings

03

Lower costs

Unlike the previous year, the new wheel hub consists of components manufactured entirely by the team. The cost was drastically reduced owing to the novel-liner design which allowed the use of a single CNC lathed & milled cylinder to be split into 6 parts to produce the liners for a single hub.

Heat treated Aluminium

My team & I heat treated are own Aluminium to produce 6061-T6 by Quenching & Tempering each batch successively

The obtained stress plots containing the minimum yield stress considerably outperformed the 276MPa value used for engineering analysis.

CAD, Simulation, CNC milling & Manufacturing

Compiled below is a gallery of photos & screenshots from my time designing & manufacturing the wheel hubs.

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