Weight Optimisation of Dumper Body Structure Conserving Stiffness, Buckling and Dent Performance

The entire commercial vehicle industry is moving towards weight reduction to leverage on the latest materials available to benefit in payload & fuel efficiency. General practice of weight reduction using high strength steel with reduced thickness in reference to Roark’s formula does not consider the stiffness & dent performance. While this helps to meet the targeted weight reduction keeping the stress levels within the acceptable limit, but with a penalty on stiffness & dent performance. The parameters of stiffener like thickness, section & pitching are very important while considering the Stiffness, bucking & dent performance of a dumper body. The Finite Element Model of subject dumper body has been studied in general particularly on impact of dent performance and is correlated with road load data to provide unique solution to the product. The impact of payload during loading of dumper is the major load case. While the stiffness increases with the height of stiffener, the buckling tendency has an adverse effect on the same. Unique geometry with appropriate section modulus and positioning plays a vital role in improving the stiffness. This paper emphasizes on the fact that Weight Optimisation can be done choosing an ideal value for each of these factors using various Design of Experiments studies, FE Analysis and correlations with physical test results ensuring the best stiffness, buckling & dent performance for the design.