Weight reduction of heavy commercial vehicle using advanced materials

Abstract

The rapidly increasing economic growth leads to advancement in the automotive sector. Concept of road vehicles have changed drastically based in terms of on their design and other functional aspects. Vehicle manufacturers are continuously improving the design of the heavy load carrying vehicles .The developed countries started manufacturing heavy commercial vehicle(HCV) which can carry more load than ordinary vehicle without hampering the mileage of vehicle. These HCV are having lower weight than ordinary vehicle. Leading HCV manufacturing companies looking for more technical enhanced, fuel efficient and economically viable HCV. The best way to increase efficiency of the HCV is to reduce the weight of vehicle. Mileage of a vehicle is related to the fuel consumption of the vehicle. When the load on the vehicle increases, its engine has to do more work to generate the thrust required to propel the vehicle. It results in excessive fuel consumption i.e. increase in load on the vehicle increases its fuel consumption. When the load (weight of the goods) on the engine increases it increases the mean effective pressure of the engine cycle and friction power (difference between indicated power and brake power). If a vehicle requires same brake power, which is available at its wheels, then it has to accelerate more which increases fuel consumption as compared to the unloading condition for same distance of travel. Because weight directly affect the mileage of vehicle so weight should be less. VECV (Volvo Eicher Commercial Vehicle) which is the joint venture between the Valvo group (Volvo) and Either Motors Limited is facing the problem of heavy weight of vehicle due to which vehicles are not able to perform well. So to eradicate this problem VECV Ltd. made collaboration with IIT Indore and ask how to reduce the weight of vehicles. In this research main aim is to develop advanced new composite material for bus flooring and suggest alternate material for hatrack assembly which is having lesser weight than what they are currently using without compromising the strength of material. They are anticipating weight reduction about approximately 50% in bus flooring and hatrack assembly. After suggesting and developing advanced material the main aim is to check out the desire mechanical, chemical and other different properties of these new materials. After developing composite material it can be concluded that weight reduction in case of single layer fiber and double layer on balsa wood as core material reduces weight about 63%. And 42.93% respectively and in case of SAN foam as core material weight reduction in double layer and single layer fiber is about 49.6% and 32.92% respectively. The results obtained after performing the experiment on double layer fiber meeting the expectation while results obtained on single layer fiber are not much significance. For hatrack assembly the suggested alternate material reduces the weight significantly.