Continuous Fiber Reinforced Composite Container for N1 category of Vehicles

The small commercial vehicle business is driven by demand in logistic, last mile transportation and white goods market. And to cater these businesses operational and safety needs, they require closed container on vehicle. As of now, very few OEM's provide regulatory certified container vehicle because of constrains to meet inertia class of the vehicle. The paper focuses on design of a durable and extremely reliable container, made of the low-cost economy class glass fiber & core material. The present work provides the means to design the composite container for the N1 category of the vehicle. The weight of after-market metal container ranges between 300-350 Kgs for this category of vehicle, which affects the overall Fuel Economy and Emission of the vehicle. A detailed CAE analysis is done to design composite container suitable to meet inertia class targets and to achieve weight reduction of 30-40% as compared to metal container. The design is validated and optimised using Inertia Relief Analysing, considering 38 load cases derived from real-life road running condition like pothole braking, bump steer etc. Additionally, 40 kg of horizontal load on the side walls (person leaning on side wall) and 750 Pa of live load on roof panel (person climbing on roof) is also considered. The container is designed considering overload of 50% over the GVW of the vehicle. The pre-processing of the model is done using Altair HyperMeshTM, the solver used is Altair OptiStructTM and post-processing is done using Altair HyperWorks 2019. Maximum Stress Criteria is used as the failure criteria considering maximum allowable stress as 99 MPa and Factor of Safety (FOS) as 1.3. Variable laminate structure design is used across different components of the container to optimize the overall weight. The designed container included additional features like wide door opening, integrated magnetic stopper, tail lamp, cabin light, container window.