DeepWheel: Generating a 3D Synthetic Wheel Dataset for Design and Performance Evaluation
This addresses a data gap for engineers in automotive design, enabling data-driven methods like surrogate modeling and inverse design, though it is incremental as it applies existing AI techniques to a new domain.
The study tackled the lack of large-scale datasets for vehicle wheel design by creating DeepWheel, a synthetic dataset with over 6,000 images and 900 3D models using generative AI and structural simulations.
Data-driven design is emerging as a powerful strategy to accelerate engineering innovation. However, its application to vehicle wheel design remains limited due to the lack of large-scale, high-quality datasets that include 3D geometry and physical performance metrics. To address this gap, this study proposes a synthetic design-performance dataset generation framework using generative AI. The proposed framework first generates 2D rendered images using Stable Diffusion, and then reconstructs the 3D geometry through 2.5D depth estimation. Structural simulations are subsequently performed to extract engineering performance data. To further expand the design and performance space, topology optimization is applied, enabling the generation of a more diverse set of wheel designs. The final dataset, named DeepWheel, consists of over 6,000 photo-realistic images and 900 structurally analyzed 3D models. This multi-modal dataset serves as a valuable resource for surrogate model training, data-driven inverse design, and design space exploration. The proposed methodology is also applicable to other complex design domains. The dataset is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International(CC BY-NC 4.0) and is available on the https://www.smartdesignlab.org/datasets