Lightweight underrun

Last crawled date: 1 year, 10 months ago

My idea of underrun protection for a truck.

The goal of my design is the lowest possible weight with reasonable manufacturing cost. This is why i've chosen sheet metal design, which should provide enough stiffness with straigth forward manufacturing.
Whole assembly consist of only 3 different parts. Yellow parts (in the renderings of exploded view) are made using laser cutter from 10mm thick steel. Red parts have bigger thickness (30mm), so they would have to be cutted by waterjet . Whole assembly would then be welded together.

Assembly weigth : 44.1 Kg

P1 load case:
Maximal VM stress: 348.7 MPa
Maximal deformation: 9.182 mm

P2 load case:
Maximal VM stress: 353.1 MPa
Maximal deformation: 2.786 mm

P3 load case:
Maximal VM stress: 353.4 MPa
Maximal deformation: 2.315 mm

For analysis I have used the build in FEA plugin in Autodesk Inventor 2014. I have also tried the SimScale "software" but same as others on the market there is a problem with importing of new design iteration. It just takes a lot more time to do it and setup analysis again and again.

PS: About the aesthetic of the design.... Well it's yellow :)