Stress Analysis and Design of Main Reducer Housing Using Finite Element Method

The main reducer housing takes over the shaft loads from gear engagement and transmits to other components, such as differential, semiaxle and driving wheels, so the main reducer housing with enough strength and stiffness is very important. Some factors preventing it from failure need to be taken into consideration when design it. To design a main reducer housing with better performance, in this paper, FEA (Finite Element Analysis) is used to analysis the main reducer housing and to find out some big stress regions. Then, some modifications are proposed to eliminate those big stress regions and obtain a reliable main reducer housing. During the analysis process, an annulus model is built and the reaction forces between the differential bearing seats and axle housing are calculated to determine whether they contact with each other. Finally, some design methods and improvements of the original design main reducer housing are proposed. And numerical comparison results of the stress distribution of the original and improved main reducer housing validate the effectiveness of the proposed methods and modifications in this paper. Those stress analysis and modifications in this paper are time-saving and money-saving before mass production.