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

Transport industry plays a vital role in development of economy of countries. To increase the load carrying capacity of the truck, the weight of truck bed may be reduced using fibre reinforced composite material. In this work, a numerical investigation is performed to reduce the weight of the truck bed using different types of laminated composites. An extensive study is conducted using unidirectional and woven fibres of glass, carbon and Kevlar fibres with polyester, epoxy and vinyl ester resins. Carbon fibre laminated plates have higher stiffness than Glass and Kevlar composite plates. Asymmetrically hybrid composite plates have lower stiffness than symmetrically hybrid composite plates. It is observed that the stiffness of plate is increased when kevlar unidirectional fibres are arranged at top and bottom of the laminate. [K/Gw]S hybrid composite plates has the lowest deflection than other five hybrid composite plates. An optimization study is performed to identify the influencing parameter for deflection of the composite materials among material type, fibre volumetric fraction and the thickness of plate using Taguchi method. The results revealed that thickness of the plate has more influential than other two parameters.

Numerical Deflection Analysis of Rectangular Laminated Composite Plates - Truck Bed - Case Study

Truck industry is a major source of transportation in India. With an average truck travelling about 300 kilometers per day [1], every kilogram of truck weight is of concern to the industry in order to get the best out of the truck. The main objective of this project is to increase the payload capacity of automotive truck body. Every kilogram of increased vehicle weight will decrease the vehicle payload capacity in turn increasing the manufacturing cost and reducing the fuel economy by increase the fuel consumption. With the intension of weight reduction, standard truck body has been designed and analyzed in ANSYS software. C-cross section beams were used instead of conventional rectangular box sections to reduce the weight of the body. Light-weight Aluminum alloy Al 6061 T6 is used to increase the payload capacity. The strength of the Truck platform is monitored in terms of deformation and stress concentration. These parameters will be obtained in structural analysis test condition environment. For reducing the stress concentration the concept of beams of uniform strength is used. Accordingly necessary modifications are done so that the optimized model has a better stress distribution and much lesser weight compared to the conventional model. The results obtained by analyzing the modified model are compared with the standard model.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1757-899X/263/6/062065/pdf

K Ravi

Papers

Design and analysis of truck body for increasing the payload capacity