Research of damage to the rear wheel rim in a tipper-truck

Serious damage to the inner rim of the rear twin wheel in one dump truck was noted during the operation of the fleet performing transport tasks. It was a drive wheel, and its damage occurred while driving with a load exceeding the permissible value. The examination of selected fragments of the damaged rim surface was conducted visually as well as using a digital microscope with a portable head. The measurements of the Vickers hardness and microscopic observations of the material structure of the sample cut along the thickness of the rim disk were carried out. The drive torque loading of the twin wheels of the tipper-truck rear axle, under their mating with different kinds of road roughness and under various vertical loads of the wheels was calculated. An analysis of stress distributions in the rim modelled using the Finite Element Method was also conducted for several possible scenarios of wheel loading. The damage to the rim was caused by simultaneous action of several factors, such as overloading the car, poor condition of the tires, loading the drive wheel by a part of the vehicle weight and the driving torque, and hitting a wheel on a cavity in a dirt road, causing a temporary relief of one of the tires on a twin wheel.