Product Design and Development of Wheel Hub for an All-Terrain Vehicle (ATV)

Abstract

Utilizing the Concept of Product Design and Development in order to Design, analyse, manufacture and test a wheel hub for an All Terrain Vehicle (ATV). Using Finite Element Analysis as a method for reduction of cost in terms of material and manufacturing, we compared the results of different designs with different materials and selected the optimum combination for manufacturing. Commercial vehicle industry is focusing on bringing quality products at competitive costs. While product weight has got a direct impact on the cost of the component, it also has an impact in the operating profits in case of a commercial vehicle. This project explains the use of the design and development of hub, the result of this project is that proposed hub which uses aluminium 6061 T6 as the material is approximately 35% less weight than the EN8 Mild Steel hub. The designed hub was effectively used in our Electric ATV which was subsequently approved by the panel judges of the SAE BAJA 2015. Based on the outputs obtained from the previous design, new practical designs were generated and FE analysis was carried out for the optimized design to verify the strength of the hub. This optimized material resulted in weight saving of the wheel hub without affecting the functional requirement