DESIGN FAILURE MODES AND EFFECTS ANALYSIS OF AN ELECTRIC KART

Manish Kumar Kar

Abstract: Ecokart is an all India level competition organised by (Viridescent Educational Services) in which an electric-kart is designed and fabricated by undergraduate engineering students. An electric kart is a small, four wheeled, open vehicle but unlike a go-kart which is powered by an internal combustion engine, electric kart is run by a motor which is powered by battery. Right from design considerations, the fabrication is to be done by modifying and assembling various components. DFMEA (Design Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) is branch of FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) which is a quality management tool that identifies the critical components of a product followed by investigating different failure modes and their subsequent effects on the whole product. This paper implements DFMEA technique on an electric-kart by identifying various failure modes and their effects on the kart.RPN (Risk Priority Technique) is a famous sub tool of it which is used in this paper in order to find the components that are more susceptible to the failure and demands more attention. Preventive measures to reduce the chances of failure are also given in the paper.

Keywords: Risk Priority Number (RPN), Severity Ranking, Ecokart, Likelihood of Detection, Likelihood of occurrence

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2017.0607009