Design and analysis of mild steel mini truck body for increasing the payload capacity

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matpr.2020.06.459Get rights and content

Abstract

In India most of the small scale industries and traders would modify their vehicle body in order to maximize the load carrying capacity of the truck for economical reason. These alteration are done without proper design and analysis. In this work the vehicle body is designed to increase the pay load capacity of mini truck from 1.5 tons to 2 tons. The proposed model is analyzed for distributed load, line load and impact load due to cylindrical object. The impact analysis is done by assuming a set of cylinders weighing 1 tons dropped from 1 cm height. The vehicle body is modelled in CATIA and analyzed using ANSYS 16.2 FEA commercial software. The material chosen for analysis is mild steel. The strength of the body is assessed using deformation, stress and factor of safety value obtained from FEA analysis. The stress concentration is high at intersection point of body and chassis and also at top corner of the side channels and it is reduced by design modification. The final results shows that the proposed design is safe for the assumed.

Introduction

Light Commercial Vehicles (LCV) is getting more popular among companies for transporting goods to different locations. The need for reducing the stockholding makes the companies to move the goods in LCV vehicles and in addition to that LCV is getting popular due to following reasons (1) Time critical parcel needs faster service (2) Growth of home delivery sales – home shopping and delivery (3) Shortage in availability of drivers (4) More operating cost in urban areas [1], [2], [3], [4]. LCV are modified by small and mid-size companies in India to transport more goods for economic reasons. These modifications are made on the basis of their experience rather than design knowledge. Due to lack of design and analysis, unnecessary frames are added which intern increases the weight of the vehicle and affects the mileage. In some cases the body could not withstand the extra load and deforms permanently. The main load acting on commercial vehicle is bending due to vertical loading. The load carrying vehicles are subjected to bending load which is overcome by changing cross section, section modulus and material properties [5]. The bending moment and shear force diagram of 2 dimensional beam was obtained to determine the number of channels and frames to be used in the design. The effect of design modification on weight reduction is more efficient than going for lighter materials [6]. Weight can also be reduced by changing the shape of the frame and channel without affecting the sectional modulus of vehicle. Using of C or U section reduces the material used without affecting the sectional modulus [7], [8], [9].

The payload can be increased by using C sectional mild steel frames instead of structural steel frames. The alternate material for structural steel was selected based on the criteria (1) less denser than structural steel (2) easy for manufacturing (3) strength should be higher or equal to structural steel (4) resistance to corrosion (5) resistance to abrasion (6) low cost [10], [11].

Aluminium 6061 T6 is another alternative material for vehicle body due to its higher yield strength with less dense than steel. The drawback of using thinner surface leads to buckling of the structure [12], [13], [14], [15]. The vehicle subjected to impact load or overloading of weight was analysed by multiplying static load with a impact factor to obtain the impact load condition. In general impact factor is taken as 1.3 for low impact analysis and for higher loading condition it is in the range of 5 to 6 [16], [17], [18], [19].

The vehicle body consist of C channel, square channel and sheet in base & sides above channel structure for carrying the load. The total load carried is acting on the bottom sheet and channels at the bottom, hence C channels are used at the bottom for its higher resistance to bending load. The square channels are used in the sides for its ability to with stand bending load and aesthetic reasons. The body dimension and chassis connection position with body are selected as per the dimensions measured from TATA Pickup Truck [20], [21], [22], [23], [24]. The geometrical model for distributed load is shown in Fig. 1a, the Fig. 1b shows the gas cylinder stacked model for determining the structural stability of the body in stacked cylinder (line load) analysis and the drop test model containing one row of cylinder is shown in Fig. 1c. The dimension details and loading parameters are given in Table 1.

Section snippets

Material properties

The material in general used for vehicle body is cast iron and mild steel due to its higher strength, more availability and low cost [25], [26], [27], [28]. In this work the proposed body is acted by different categorized load and mild steel is selected for its higher yield strength compared to cast iron. The material properties of mild steel used for analysis is shown in Table 2.

Boundary conditions and meshing

The proposed model is expected to carry distributed load like sand, line load like cylinder stacked one above other and impact load due to falling of cylinders, hence the analysis is carried for all the mentioned load conditions [29], [30] (Fig. 2).

Result and discussions

The analysis is categorized according to the load such as distributed load, line load and impact load. The distributed load is acted on base and sides of the vehicle body, for line load the cylinder is stacked one above other and the total load is transferred through the bottom five cylinders to the vehicle body and impact load is given by considering the five cylinders of bottom row dropped from the height of 1 cm.

Conclusion

The light commercial vehicles (LCV) is used mainly by small scale companies and distributors to transport the goods to needed location. In general, the vehicle is overloaded more than the prescribed vehicle capacity by companies to increase the profit. In this work design modification is done for the vehicle body of TATA pickup truck to increase the loading capacity from 1.5 to 2 tones. The vehicle body is made of mild steel material. The proposed model is numerically analysed using FEA for

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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