Structural Assessment of a Bus Body Through the Finite Element Method 2020-36-0420

A safe public transport every citizen’s right, so vehicular safety are ruled by standards and regulations, where bus manufacturing companies must comply with such requirements, ensuring that the body structure will be able to guarantee the physical integrity its occupants, even against events such as vehicle rollover. CONTRAN 629 resolution is the Brazilian standard responsible for defining the minimum safety values, setting out the procedures and test methods to be performed to certify the mechanical strength of a M3 category vehicle. In this context the present paper seeks to develop a methodology that allows to perform a numerical evaluation for the structure of an urban bus, verifying if the proposed frame meets the mechanical requirements established by standards. Thereby, it was performed an experimental test and numerical simulation of a structural module, which represents the frame of an urban bus. The experimental module was trialed according to the specifications of CONTRAN 629 standard, where the tests of vertical load on the roof and lateral traction load were executed. Through these tests, the values for the structure displacement were obtained for the respective applied load. A numerical analysis was also performed, using the Finite Element Method (FEM), seeking to make a comparison between the obtained results with both procedures of assessment. The results have shown that the proposed structural module meets the CONTRAN 629 standard. In addition, the comparison of the displacement values obtained experimentally and computationally presented similar results, thus allowing to validate the numerical methodology proposed by this study.