Hey, connections
11th August marked the last date of my stint with Utilimaster as an engineering intern with the Advanced Engineering Department. In this fast-paced and exciting period, I contributed to the design and FEA activities of the cabin and body structures of The Shyft Group's latest venture, the Blue Arc™ EV truck.
Here, I worked on multiple projects related to the full-vehicle FEA model in Ansys for durability. This involved modifying the FE model to improve fidelity and correlating the model results with the field test truck. By making careful improvements to the material and contact model, the maximum correlation between the virtual model and the manufactured vehicle was achieved. Also, debugging capability and adaptability of the model to newer part versions were improved by creating individual and manual fasteners and glue bonds throughout the FE model and sorting the connections based on the assembly order in the FE model. Hence, my efforts lead to the generation of a highly adaptable and flexible FE model of the truck used for evaluating and correlating the vehicle performance in drop, twisting, braking, acceleration and cornering load cases.
Another project that I worked on was redesigning the driver seat pedestal to conform with the FMVSS 207/210 seat pull test norms. The new design iterations were successful in reducing the weight of the seat pedestal assembly by 35%. By providing symmetric parts and visual markers on the parts, mistake-proofing was achieved. Assembly features were provided that served dual purposes, i.e. fixturing in local assembly and mounting in global assembly. Hence, the initial assembly time was potentially cut down by 50%.
I also worked on the fatigue life estimation of the door latch and stopper assembly. This involved an explicit dynamic simulation of the door impact physics and using the results to perform Ncode DesignLife simulations to predict life and calculate damage.
These projects proved crucial in growing my understanding of commercial vehicle structural FEA procedures and gave me valuable experience in preprocessing, resource planning and postprocessing of the results. It also helped me hone my reporting skills and analyse the results to generate meaningful patterns and effectively communicate them with the decision-makers.
I am eternally grateful to Utilimaster and The Shyft Group for providing me with this opportunity. I thank everyone who contributed towards my internship.
Cheers!
#ev #fea #structuralanalysis #structuraldesign #trucks
I am Nasir Ali and I am auto painter .
2mo,💯👍💯💯❤️