Design and Analysis of Zero Turning Radius Steering System for Light Vehicles (Bajaj QUTE)

In this work, a two-mode steering system which has minimum turning and zero turning configurations has been modelled and simulated in CATIA V5 and analysed in ANSYS 18.1. A detailed conceptual design process was done which helps to evaluate a variety of concept variants and select the appropriate and efficient design path for the developed mechanism which has the two modes in a single car. In this study, different assumptions were made appropriately using the data by visiting different websites as well as by measuring directly from the car. To check the strength of the components of the designed steering system, static structural analysis and eigenvalue buckling analysis were done with proper mesh size. In addition to this, the kinematic analysis of the assembled system was carried out using CATIA DMU kinematics to see how the motion of the mechanism look like and to check whether it can move as required or not. In this work, it is found that the turning radius of the benchmark vehicle (Bajaj QUTE) is minimized from 3.5 to 1.13 m which results in a decrement of 62.4% in minimum turning configuration, and it has a 100% reduction in zero turning radius mode. That means, using zero turning radius mode, the minimum area required to rotate the vehicle 3600 is only 7.3 m² which can be available everywhere and helps the driver to manoeuvre easily and drive in the required direction. While reducing the turning radius of a vehicle, it is obvious that the critical speed will become less during negotiating a curve due to load transfer. Hence, the critical speed during the application of minimum turning configuration is about 43 km/h, and it is 31 km/h when the driver uses a zero turning mode.