Fatigue life analysis of wheels on guideway vehicle using multibody dynamics

A guideway vehicle is used in automobile, semiconductor and LCD manufacturing industries to transport products efficiently. Since the operating speed of the guideway vehicle should be increased for maximum productivity, the weight of the vehicle has to be reduced, and this weight reduction may cause a failure of a part in the system. Therefore, the estimation of the fatigue life of the parts becomes an important problem. In this study, the fatigue life of the wheels in the guideway vehicle is estimated using an S-N curve. To obtain the fatigue life of a part, the S-N curve, the dynamic stress time history applied to the part, and the material property of the part are required. The S-N curve of the driving wheel is obtained from the fatigue experiment on wheels. To obtain the material properties of the driving wheel, which is composed of aluminum with urethane coating, the result of a compression hardware test and static analysis of the wheel’s FE model are used. The dynamic stress time history influencing the driving wheel can be obtained from linear superposition of the dynamic load time history and the static stress. The dynamic load time history is estimated by multibody dynamic analysis, and the static stress is obtained by finite element analysis.