Aluminum Gear Shift Fork with Supporting Pad for Light Weighting in Commercial Vehicles 2015-01-0088

To compete with the current market trends there is always a need to arrive at a cost effective and light weight designs. For Commercial Vehicles, an attempt is made to replace existing Gear Shift Fork from FC Iron (Ferro Cast Iron) to ADC (Aluminum Die Casting) without compromising its strength & stiffness, considering/bearing all the worst road load cases and severe environmental conditions. ADC has good mechanical and thermal properties compared to FC Iron. Feasible design has been Optimized within the given design space with an extra supporting pad for load distribution. Optimization, Stiffness, Contact pattern has been done using OptiStruct, Nastran & Ansys for CAE evaluation. A 6-speed manual transmission is used as an example to illustrate the simulation and validation of the optimized design.

Advanced linear topology optimization methods have been addressed as the most promising techniques for light weighting and performance design of Powertrain structures. The theoretical achievements are obtained both mechanically and mathematically. Nowadays, the great challenge lies in solving more complicated engineering design problems with multidisciplinary objectives or complex structural systems.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an insight into the conversion of material and achieving an optimized design without compromising on functionality of the product using structural linear topology optimization. The advantage of the proposed method is that structural optimization on irregular design domains can be carried out effectively with ease. Furthermore, this method integrates the stress analysis and the boundary evolution within the framework of finite element methods. For this, I have used linear Topology Optimization technique with the help of Simulation tool Altair OptiStruct and lastly, tested the aluminum gear shift fork with supporting pad under VE Commercial Vehicles Ltd Standard Durability Cycles.