Volume 12 Issue 1 ( March 2025)

A chassis is one of the essential parts of an electric motorcycle, which provides good structural stability to withstand various loading and unloading conditions. The weight and strength of a chassis are important aspects that should be considered during the design stage. The main purpose of this study is to identify the best material for the chassis by combining DLM and FEA. Then, the FEA results are validated by Experimental testing. Different static loading conditions have been applied which is expected to represent various loading condition that occurs in the actual performance of the electric motorcycle frame. In addition, the stress distribution, safety factor, and deformation of the same frame structure with different materials were evaluated to finalize the best suitable material for the chassis on the basis of strength, cost, and weight of the chassis for each loading condition. Based on the DLM method, it has been proposed that an STKM11A is suitable for the analysis compared with other materials in all criteria. The DLM shows that STKM11A is the best material for the platform based on the considered factors. Besides that, the experiment and simulation have a good correlation although some points have the wide gap value such as 14.71% at strain gauge 2.

Keywords: Chassis; Electric motorcycle; Design; Finite element method; Material selection