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In two wheelers the front suspension system is mounted on chassis by two steering bearings which are lubricated ball type angular contact bearings with significant radial force components. These bearings are designed to withstand maximum vehicle loads for target durability. Maximum load carrying capacity depends on the number and size of the balls, bearing size and material. For target durability with designed load carrying capacity, the ball contact pressure, bearing preload plays a major role as compared to other design parameters. Geometry parameters and maximum load defines contact pressure for given bearing design. But in two wheelers due to nature of usage and road conditions, the peak loads are dynamic and geometry based design calculations may not yield the most optimal bearing design. In this work the bearing ball race profile design is optimized by using dynamic bearing contact profiles by using nonlinear Finite Element Analysis.

Ability to meet customer expectations and understand customer usage behavior is fundamental to the delivery of the successful products in the Automobile industry. A combination of data collection tools such as customer survey and customer chasing technique with instrumented vehicle are generally used to get insight into the customer usage pattern and driving style. The available information can be priceless if it is used to tailor laboratory test standards representative of customer usage behavior. Test cycles, tailored based on specific customer usage behavior, have the potential to work as very effective design filter during the validation stage of new product design and development process. In this paper, a method to tailor vehicle level durability driving cycle on a laboratory scale roller Chassis dynamometer has been demonstrated. This cycle is developed based on the data collected with customer for their daily usage routine.

The importance of style design has increased tremendously in Indian two-wheeler market and at the same time new styles become obsolete in a short period. This rapidly changing market trend demands simulation methodology to evaluate the component for various loads in the design stage itself to reduce the product development cycle time. Aluminum cast footrest is preferred for better looks compared to sheet metal or tubular footrest. Normal load carried by the footrest is quite low but consideration should be given for severe loads experienced by the footrest during adverse conditions, like for example, hitting against potholes at high speed. In this current work an initial design of a die-cast footrest bracket with a particular geometric configuration and material was analyzed using finite element analysis for static and dynamic loads.

A methodology is presented to do accelerated vibration durability test, on Electro Dynamic Shaker (EDS) by using Power Spectral Density (PSD) profile based on typical customer usage pattern. A generalized iterative procedure is developed to optimize input excitation PSD profile on EDS for simulating the exact customer usage conditions. The procedure minimizes the error between the target channels measured on road and the response channels measured on EDS. Also, response of accelerometers and strain gauges at multiple locations on the test component are arrived at based on a single input excitation using this procedure. The same is verified experimentally as well. Different parameters like strain, acceleration, etc. are simulated simultaneously. This methodology has enabled successful simulation of road conditions in lab, thereby arriving at a correlation between rig and road. The correlation obtained is based on the simulation of the same failure mode as that of the road on the rig.