Design and Development of Composite Road Wheel for Tracked Vehicles

摘要

The Armoured fighting vehicle designers are continuously fighting for ways to reduce vehicle weight, increase fuel efficiency, improve reliability, and reduce cost. Customized engineering design and materials are becoming more widespread on all fronts. Also, vehicle emission norms are getting stringent day by day and there is increasing pressure to reduce fuel consumption. One important method of achieving the fuel economy and improve vehicle performance is to reduce vehicle weight. In view of the above advanced materials like Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) composites are promising to be the material to look for when it comes to reduce weight of structural elements due to its high strength to weight and high stiffness to weight ratios and hence was used for the development of Bogie Wheel of a light tracked vehicle. This paper illustrates the developmental methodology of Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) Road wheel for 20 ton class of tracked vehicle. The Composite Road wheel was tested on the test rig which simulated all the loading conditions of the ICV (Infantry Combat Vehicle).