Stress Analysis and Design of the Frame of a Personal Electric Vehicle

Electric vehicles (EVs), as an emerging transportation platform, have been introduced over the past several decades due to various concerns about air pollution and the contribution of emissions to global climate change and due to road congestion. Electric vehicles are the answer and it has evolved to a personal electric vehicle (PEV) which is designed for a single person ride. PEV has a limited range of travel due to limitations of energy from the battery and weight of the vehicle itself that consumes power of the battery. Due to that, chassis of PEV has a potential to help reducing the weight of the vehicle. In this project an analysis on the chassis of sit-on cycle type PEV is made in order to determine the concentration of stress. Therefore, a lighter chassis can be designed without compromise with the necessary strength for convenient riding. The designed chassis is analyzed under working load with various condition of riding including road condition by using a finite element analysis. The reduction of mass from the new design with Aluminum-6061 is 63% without reducing the working load and structural requirement. Aluminum-6061 result with mass reduction on the PEV frame to 2 kg as compared to the Alloy-Steel frame which is 5.5 kg of mass. The reduction of PEV frame is contributed by two major factors which are the material of the frame and the geometry of the frame.