Design and Crash Analysis of Ladder Chassis

Sammanfattning: A chassis is known as the carrying unit of an automobile, like the engine, transmission shaft and other parts are mounted on it. Ladder chassis has longitudinal rails which are connected along the length with crossmembers through welding or mechanical fasteners. Rectangular box section is chosen for the longitudinal rails of ladder chassis. Design modifications are done in HyperMesh to improve torsional and bending stiffness of the chassis designed in steel and CFRP. Adding of the X- bracing cross-member and ribs are few of the techniques used to provide strength to chassis. This thesis aims to produce a light-weight chassis. A combination chassis of both steel and CFRP components is created by replacing heavy steel cross-members with CFRP cross-members, which resulted in the reduction of weight by 14.6%. Crash analysis is performed to all the chassis using Radioss. Depending on the result obtained from crash analysis and values of torsional and bending stiffness, the combination chassis is selected. Thickness optimization is performed to the combination chassis. It is observed that 7.91% of weight is further reduced in the combination chassis.