TRUCK CHASSIS STRUCTURAL THICKNESS OPTIMIZATION WITH THE HELP OF FINITE ELEMENT TECHNIQUE

Heavy duty vehicles like trucks, has wide range of structural and conceptual design. In Turkey ground transportations and heavy duty works like mine and rock transportation are made with Long Vehicles and especially with middle tonnage trucks (10 – 40 tones). Many truck chassis manufacturers use thick profiles for the chassis for reliability of the frame. Using more than enough material causes expensive product manufacturing conditions. To reduce the expenses of the chassis of the trucks, the frame’s structure design should be changed or the thickness should be decreased. In this study, for manufacturing reliable and inexpensive middle tonnage truck chassis, used chassis structures by some manufacturers are optimized by the thicknesses of the profiles. This study showed that the thinner chassis profiles can be reliably used in the truck chassis sections with the help of structural finite element analysis.