Chassis Design with Integrated Battery Pack Space for Electric Motorcycle

Abstract

One of the prime goals of the automobile industry has been the reduction of the weight of the products. This helps in improving the performance of the vehicles. Lightweight vehicles have various advantages ranging from handling to safety. Lesser weight means lesser kinetic energy, due to which the crashworthiness of the vehicle improves. Topology optimization has been performed to extract the geometrical shape of the chassis from the control volume (design domain) for the chassis, whose dimensions are based on the existing two-wheeler chassis of the commuter segment in Indian motorcycling market. The work has focused on the designing of a chassis for an electric motorcycle by incorporating the battery pack space inside the chassis space. The objective has been to minimize the volume and maximize the stiffness with application of relevant geometric restrictions. The final geometrical shape has been used to build the roll-cage structure of the chassis. The work has proposed three models with 70, 80, and 90% volume reduction and the 90% weight reduction model has been used to build manufacturable chassis based on the topology optimization output.