Structural Analysis of Automotive Chassis Frame and Design Modification for Weight Reduction

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 report 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. Structural systems like the chassis can be easily analyzed using the finite element techniques. A sensitivity analysis is carried out for weight reduction. So a proper finite element model of the chassis is to be developed. The chassis is modeled in PRO-E. FEA is done on the modeled chassis using the ANSYS Workbench