EV Wheel Hub Optimisation

MellowVans, a South African EV startup, was preparing their last-mile delivery platform for the EU market. The existing wheel hub was over-specced for the new regulatory envelope — overweight meant worse range, higher cost, and regulatory friction. The brief during my internship was to redesign the hub for significant mass reduction while still passing stress and fatigue requirements.

Treated the redesign as a constrained optimisation rather than a blank-sheet exercise. Kept the hub's mounting interfaces fixed so the part dropped into the existing assembly, then iterated the geometry — pocketing, rib placement, wall thicknesses — with FEA feedback after each revision.

Every iteration ran static stress and fatigue-life analyses in Autodesk Inventor against the EU-mandated load cases, so the design converged on the lightest geometry that still met the margin.

CAD and simulation in Autodesk Inventor. Static FEA under the EU load cases to confirm peak stress stayed within yield margins; fatigue analysis to confirm life under cyclic loading; mesh refinement around stress concentrators (fillets, bolt holes) to make sure the numbers were real and not artefacts.

Alongside the hub work I was running circuit validation on the vehicle's fuse boxes with a multimeter and oscilloscope in KiCAD schematics, and rebuilding the company's BOM in Excel against supplier invoices.

Final hub design achieved a **50.2% mass reduction** from the original while meeting all EU stress and fatigue requirements. The redesigned part dropped straight into the existing vehicle assembly — no downstream rework. I also participated in a full-vehicle assembly trial that fed insights back into the scaled production SOPs.