Strength Evaluation of Motorcycle Fuel Tank subject to Vehicle Drop through Finite Element Analysis

Motorcycles which are designed for both regular as well as rough terrains experience more severe vertical impact loads from ground in comparison with motorcycles which travel only on regular terrains. Therefore, drop test is considered an important method to evaluate durability for said vehicles. Fuel Tank mounted over front frame of a motorcycle is the most critical component from safety point of view and hence, need to be analysed for vertical drop load case. To do so, modelling of whole vehicle can be a hectic task and has to be avoided. In the present work, behaviour of fuel tank mounted over frame support and subjected to vertical drop from H(m) height is studied with the help of support excitation method incorporated with explicit non-linear time integration scheme using Finite Element Analysis (FEA) code in commercial FEA software. Through this scheme, effect on Fuel Tank of vehicle drop can be studied without actually modelling the whole vehicle. Results from FEA software were compared with that of testing to correlate and validate the accuracy of said technique.