Development of dynamic response analysis for flexible lightweight vehicle chassis

Abstract

The development in vehicle design is on-going growth. Many new inventions appeared to produce a better vehicle. There is also an effort to replace steel with a lighter weight of material such as aluminium in order to reduce weight of vehicle. However, this process facing difficulty when dealing with the properties of the material and its compatibility to the vehicle performance. The challenge of the light material usage is the vibrational issue on the chassis structure and expensive cost for physical prototyping models. Hence, this research is to study the vibrational issue in improving the development of go-kart chassis. The method applied is the simulation of multi-body dynamic using Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) software. The computational model is based on the real physical model. Simulation model is designed as a go-kart vehicle running on the road bump surface. The road bump surface represents the excitation of the vibration to the go-kart model. This go-kart model is developed as a multi-body dynamic model which is the deformable chassis body linked with the deformable tires. To develop the proper movement of the go-kart, the degree of freedom is assigned to the joined parts using boundary condition and constraint. The interaction contact is also developed between the tire and the road bump. Output of the simulation model is acceleration parameters that being used to validate the simulation result with acceleration gain from experiment. The real vibration phenomena of the chassis go-kart are tested through the experiment. The experiment is set up according to the simulation model. The result from the experiment is obtained and analyzed through National Instrument (NI) tools. Engine vibration is filtered from experimental result to get the correlation result with simulation. From the verification result through experiment, the simulation model is obtained 13% of the percentage error. This classified the reliability of the simulation model in the CAE software. This validated simulation model is applied for lightweight chassis which is aluminium to study the structure behavior and application of aluminum in develop chassis vehicle. The plotted result shown that the steel structure has higher vibration than aluminum, however from Von Mises Stress result, expressed that aluminum structure is easier to deform rather than steel structure. Through the analysis simulation model, the application of aluminum chassis is feasible in the application of lightweight vehicle chassis. The affect parameters are easily manipulated through CAE software and offer some benefits such as cost reduction and minimize production time rather than using conventional method. This simulation analysis technique is the efficient practice to produce the lightweight vehicle.