Structural analysis of a bicycle frame

[jmalik]

Hi,

I created a new simulation project called Structural analysis of a bicycle frame

Finite Element Analysis (FEA) on bicycle frame is important for bicycle designers and engineers to improve the performance of a bicycle frame.

More of my public projects can be found here

[jmalik]

Performing Finite Element Analysis (FEA) on a bicycle frame is important in order to improve its overall performance. The performance of a bicycle frame can be improved by minimizing mass of a frame and by improving its load carrying capacity.

Aim of Study

• Simulate the bicycle frame with sitting person on bike and driving on irregular road using static structural analysis.
• Simulate the bicycle frame while standing person applying brakes leaning against the handlebars using static structural analysis.
• Analyzing the von-misses stress and displacement of the structure.

Geometry

The Geometry of the bicycle frame was provided by GrabCad member unix-89. The model is a single solid and uploaded to the platform as IGS file. The Geometry of the bicycle frame is shown in the figure.

Mesh

The Geometry of the bicycle frame was meshed using Tet-Dominant mesh operation. The model is meshed with fully automatic second order tetrahedralization and consists of 1075757 nodes. The generated meshes are shown in the figure.

Simulations

A static structural analysis is performed to simulate the bicycle frame. The weight of the driver is assumed to be 80 Kg. Following two simulation cases are considered

1. Sitting person driving bicycle on irregular road.
2. Standing person applying brakes leaning against the handlebars.
   The load cases are based on two extremes as modelled by Maestrelli and Falsini (2008) which is based upon experimental study of Soden and Adefeye (1979)

The boundary conditions applied to the bicycle frame are

1. Both right and left posterior wheel fork have been constrained to have Ux=Uy=Uz=0
2. The vertical restraint Uy=0 on the bottom of the head tube.
   The boundary conditions are based on extremes as modeled by Maestrelli and Falsini (2008) and C. Derek, B. Steven, E. Eddy, M. Mark, M. Richard, K. Tim

Results

The results (von-misses stress and displacement) for the case ‘Sitting person and driving bicycle on irregular road’ can be seen in the following pictures.

The results (von-misses stress and displacement) for the case ‘Standing person applying brakes leaning against the handlebars’ can be seen in the following pictures.

[jousefm]

Awesome job @jmalik!