Design of a helical coil in front suspension system as a replacement for torsion bar suspension for a three-wheeler vehicle using FEA.

The paper focuses on replacing the front suspension system of a three wheeler vehicles that are presently seen making use of torsion bar suspension in front suspension. The torsion bar suspension system was earlier used in the early 1990s and late 2000s until then the helical coil suspension came into existence for a lot many vehicles being successfully replaced as it provided better feasibility and maintenance than those seen in torsion bar suspension system. Here, in this project currently a vehicle with payload capacity of 4500N, three wheeler mini-door is taking into application. It has ground clearance of 250mm from the ground level. It was verified both mathematically and analytically which of the designs off different materials pave excellent properties close enough to replace Torsion Bar Suspension. CAD model of the helical spring was done in CATIA, followed by ANSYS Simulation with proper conclusion. This project focuses on designing a helical coil for front suspension for those three wheeler vehicles which are still using Torsion Bar Front Suspension in today's condition as a replacement. The spring was designed by following the methods given in V.B. Bhandari that can withstand the vehicle weight along with payload capacity of 990Kg, that the vehicle can sustain, using different material compositions like 54SiCr6, 50CrV4, ASTM A229 apart from those used in torsion bar suspension, at a lower price and with an objective to provide better facilities that torsion bar cannot provide. Equivalent stress, shear stress analysis have been carried out using ANSYS on the designs proposed by allowing a deformation of 166 mm for set stiffness 25KN/mm as per reference papers and previous research work, and checked out of the three which spring provide the optimum results from the different materials and were selected accordingly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]