Design and development of a light weight composite chassis for electric vehicle applications

Today, the vehicle technology is being transformed due to environmental impact of fossil fuel and their uses. Especially studies appear to be directed towards development of lightweight and durable chassis system. In this way, along with achieving fuel economy in existing systems, the need for lightweight chassis for electrically powered vehicles are met. In recent years, stress analysis studies using the finite element method has made significant contributions to the design engineering. With the help of a computer software, stress and deformation analysis of a system can be achieved with very small margin of errors at very much realistic values. As a part of the study, some sample carbon fiber-epoxy composite material was manufactured and tested. Considering the test results obtained, a car chassis for two passengers is designed using SolidWorks software. The developed composite and aluminum based chassis have been analyzed on the ANSYS software and the development of the chassis has been completed successfully.