Abstract

 Stress analysis of welded steel-to-steel, bolted steel-to-steel, and bolted composite-steel chassis in an electric low floor medium bus structure is presented in this paper. The analysis was carried out on the condition that is when the bus is full of load in idle/static. This condition reflects the situation of the vehicle in full load with passengers and components, which is important to be analyzed to anticipate the unwanted structural failure of the chassis. Finite Element Method (Harmonic response simulation) is used to investigate the structural behavior of both welded and bolted methods. Several parameters such as 2 Hertz for the maximum frequency, 5000 kg for the total vehicle weight, and the uniform distribution of load are used for this study to simulate the simplified, real application in the real world. The first comparison is between the welded and bolted steel-to-steel chassis which results in the bolted method has a lower stress value by the difference of 4.3 MPa in the joint section than the welded joint. This means that the bolted joint is more recommended than welded for the use as an electric low floor medium bus and has the potential to be optimized further. In terms of reducing the weight of the chassis structure, then lightweight material (carbon fiber composite) is used to replace the full steel chassis to be a composite-steel chassis. The use of this hybrid material depicts the stress value of 61.5 MPa in the joint area, this value is still far below the limit of carbon fiber that is 3200 MPa makes this bolted composite-steel is considerably safe in full load condition as an electric low floor medium bus structure. Using this hybrid bolted composite-steel chassis structure also reduces the total chassis weight by about 22.7 % compared to the full steel chassis structure, thus one could expect to extend the mileage of electric vehicles by more than 20 %
Highlights
The need to be more mobile triggers the increase of vehicle growth in the world
Electric low floor medium bus is the object for this study and this paper aims to analyze the stress value and location of bolted joint composite-steel material as a chassis structural by doing some comparison with bolted steel-to-steel and welded steel-to-steel chassis during full load condition on the road using finite element method (FEM), which is a useful mathematical tool to calculate internal stress and strain analyses of complex structures with geometrical and material nonlinearities
Nor et al carried out the stress simulation on the low loader chassis, and from the simulation, it shows the maximum stress point appears on the contact surface between the front beam and gooseneck part [18]
Summary
The need to be more mobile triggers the increase of vehicle growth in the world. It causes a lot of environmental problems such as air pollution especially in urban areas [1, 2]. Many researchers are trying to find alternative energy sources for a vehicle to minimize fuel consumption, especially in public transportation. One of the most popular sources to replace the internal combustion engine (ICE) is by using electrical energy. This kind of source provides cleaner technology and is more environmentally friendly because of its zero-emission [4]
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