Parametric Analysis on Heavy Quadricycle Vehicle Front Crash for Safety Optimization

The present work mainly focused on analyzing the crashworthiness and optimization for heavy quadricycle vehicle that has been attracting many urbanized cities in developing countries. For this study, one of the heavy quadricycle vehicle, a Bajaj Qute, were selected, and numerical simulation for full- and partial-front impact were used to investigate the crash performance. The finite element code was done on ABAQUS. The explicit dynamics finite element analysis has adopt the real geometrical data of the Bajaj Qute bumper and splash guard for the full-front and partial-front impact with impact velocity of 50Km/hr. and polypropylene as reference material. The parametric analysis were conducted considering different material for the deformable body (Mild steel and Aluminum 6061 T6) and different thickness (2–4 mm). The study results showed that the energy absorption capacity for the front bumper and splash guard modeled with the reference material is 0.41 MJ at low speed. From the parametric analysis, although the mass of bumper and splash guards developed by Mild Steel and Aluminum 6061 T6 were found to be larger than the reference one, increasing the thickness supported to enhance the energy absorption capacity, and 4-mm-thickness polypropylene showed 43.45% and 52.59% increment of energy absorption in front-end full and side crashes, respectively. The crashworthiness of the bumper and splash guard were identified with better crash performance when aluminum material (0.24) is used compared to mild steel (0.23) and the reference one.