Assessing the Structural Crashworthiness of a Three-Wheeler Passenger Vehicle
Year: 2009
Editor: Chakrabarti, A.
Author: Srikanth.K. M; Prakash, V Raghu
Section: Design for Environment, Safety, Manufacture and Cost
Page(s): 152-159
Abstract
Over the last few decades, three wheelers, popularly termed as auto rickshaws, are gaining popularity in the commuting world due to the driving conditions prevailing all over the world. With the traf c increasing every year, esp. in developing countries like India, the proportion of three wheelers on the road is also increasing, in view of their maneuverability, easy drive through narrow lanes and operating cost considerations. Moreover,as the average speed of travel of these vehicles increases, but at the same time, the design objective is for a low cost, light weight and high payload, and greater acceleration capacity three wheelers, makes a concern for safety. Other than some basic safety features, three wheelers are not evaluated for crash worthiness. It may be noted that the crash regulations were mostly for car segment, and as such the regulation for a three wheeler is not in existence.Primarily, the crashworthiness has been studied by testing, supported by analytical methods that consider simple linear strength of material. Crash worthiness experimentation is very expensive; but, with the advancement of computer hardware and software, several analytical design capabilities have evolved, providing engineers with a variety of tools to design modern vehicle structures that can meet the growing customer demands for better crashworthiness performance. The scope of this paper is to assess the structural crashworthiness of a three wheeler passenger auto rickshaw, considering the frontal and rear impact collision using Hyper worksTM, Hyper crashTM and RadiossTM