DESIGN FAILURE MODES AND EFFECTS ANALYSIS (DFMEA) OF AN ALL-TERRAIN VEHICLE

Sidhartha Pattnaik

Abstract: Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) organizes a student engineering design competition named Baja in which an All-terrain vehicle (ATV) is designed and fabricated by undergraduate engineering students. ATV is a vehicle that can run on a wide variety of terrains and travels on low-pressure tires with a seat straddled by the operator. SAE BAJA involves designing and fabrication of a modified and scaled down smaller version of ATV. Starting from initial design and analysis to actual fabrication of ATV, everything is done by the students. As in any engineering design, there is a constant need to design a safe and sustainable vehicle. This involves predicting and defining all failure modes in the initial design step itself. An effective method of doing this failure analysis is DFMEA (Design Failure Modes and Effects Analysis), which is an extension of popular Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) technique and is done in the design stage. In this paper DFMEA technique is used to list out all modes of failure for various components of the ATV, its causes, effects and ways of preventing it. Risk Priority Number methodology of FMEA is used to find out the components which are more susceptible to failure and needs more attention than others.

Keywords: All Terrain Vehicles (ATV), Baja SAE, Design Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (DFMEA), Risk Priority Number (RPN)All Terrain Vehicles (ATV), Baja SAE, Design Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (DFMEA), Risk Priority Number (RPN)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2015.0406058