Static analysis of dump truck chassis frame made of composite materials

Abstract

For a heavy vehicle, the chassis frame is a strong member responsible for carrying the utmost lead in a safe manner when considering all the designed working situations. This paper elaborates on the static structural examination concerning the heavy duty truck chassis frame to determine the response of a truck chassis under the influence of three different load considerations such as bending, torsion and combined bending and torsion load cases acting on the horizontal C-Channel. In this paper, the dimensions of a heavy vehicle chassis of a FAW dump truck vehicle is obtained from Bishoftu Automobile Industry to model and examine an heavy vehicle chassis and the conventional materials are substituted with composite materials made up of carbon-epoxy couple with E-glass epoxy with same geometry under similar pressure or load with a steel chassis. The software employed in this work is the CATIA V5 R19 to model and the ANSYS 14.5 for the finite element analysis. The result shows that composite materials mainly carbon epoxy have high load carrying capacity and higher factor of safety than to e-glass epoxy and mild steel, and the weight of the chassis is reduced by 4.8 times for carbon epoxy and 3 times for glass epoxy. Generally using composite materials for chassis frame is safe. Material substitution is the best way to reduce weight of the vehicle so as to reduce fuel consumption and atmospheric emission which is the global issue.Keywords: Chassis, composite materials, stress, deformation