Finite Element Analysis of Truck Chassis

Automotive chassis is an important part of an automobile. The chassis serves as a frame work for supporting the body and different parts of the automobile. Also, it should be rigid enough to withstand the shock, twist, vibration and other stresses. Along with strength, an important consideration in chassis design is to have adequate bending stiffness for better handling characteristics. So, maximum stress, maximum equilateral stress and deflection are important criteria for the design of the chassis. This project is the work performed towards the optimization of the automotive chassis with constraints of maximum shear stress, equivalent stress and deflection of chassis under maximum load. A sensitivity analysis is carried out for weight reduction. So a proper finite element model of the TATA 1612 chassis is to be developed by using actual parameter, the chassis is modeled in CATIA v5. FEA is done on the modeled chassis using the ANSYS Workbench12,the FEA is carryout for static, dynamic and shape optimization. Result obtained after the analytical approach for the chassis beam in terms of it stress development is approximately closer to the FEA values. By reducing the height of the cross-member of chassis is found to be reduced by 8.72%