A REVIEW PAPER ON DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF SYSTEM OF THREE WHEELER

ABSTRACT The study of vibration in vehicles was almost exclusively based on test results until a few years ago. Then came the practice of using rigid body model with two parameters namely viz., the sprung mass and unsprung mass. Recently, the vehicle models based on finite element method have become a practical alternative to rigid body models. This approach enables the analyst to generate a model based on structural blue print dimensions and continuously varying displacements impose at the tyre contact points of the vehicle traversing on a road may be considered to be an input excitation of a dynamic system of masses, stiffness and dampers. A wobble instability is one of the major problems of a three wheeled vehicle commonly used in India, and these instabilities are of great interest to industry and academia. In this paper, we have studied this instability using a multi-body dynamic (MBD) model and with experiments conducted on a prototype three wheeled vehicle (TWV) on a test track. The MBD model of a three wheeled vehicle is developed using the commercial software ADAMS-CAR. In an initial model, all components including main structures like frame, steering column and rear forks are assumed to be rigid bodies. A linear eigenvalue analysis, carried out at different speeds, reveals a mode that has a predominantly steering oscillation, also called a Wobble mode, with frequency around 5 to 6 Hz.