Modeling, design and analysis of heavy vehicle chassis for the effects of various stress distribution

Abstract

Dump truck chassis is a major component in an Off-highway vehicle system. This research work contains modeling, design and fatigue life analysis of heavy vehicle chassis. The main objective is to determine the linear static stress distribution of the critical area which has highest stress of the chassis and to predict fatigue life of the chassis. The FE analysis have been done for a truck chassis model by utilizing commercial finite element analysis software packages like Pro-E, HYPER MESH and ANSYS. An attempt has been made to the study an off high way higher ton dump truck, which is having a range between 50 to 60 tons load carrying capacity. The linear static and fatigue analysis was carried out to determine stress distribution and fatigue life of the chassis. An entire fabricated structure, consists of plates and castings, which is welded according to BS 5400 welding standard. A high strength electrode (E 70) used for weld the complete chassis. In order to withstand heavy load and prevent fatigue failure of the chassis, high strength structural steel (IS 1030) material as per the ASTM A 148 Gr.90-60 is used for plates and ASTM A148 Gr.150-125 is used for casting to fabricate chassis. A complete feature based chassis model has been developed, to create 146 parts and assembled as per the fabricated structure by using Pro-E software. Meshing is carried out by using hyper mesh 9.0 software. FE mesh model consists of geometry cleanup, 2D and 3D mesh, nodes and elements with connectivity. The FE mesh model has 3D tetrahedral shape of solid element, which will give the closeness to the accurate result. To check the mesh quality parameters like Aspect ratio, Warpage, Jacobian and skew of an individual element. In order to get accurate result of the critical area of the chassis, locally finer meshing on the front and rear rail structure of the chassis has been done.