EXPERIMENTAL AND NUMERICAL ANALYSIS OF THE MODAL BEHAVIOUR OF A KART VEHICLE

This thesis presents the model validation of a go-kart chassis frame, made through numerical and experimental modal analysis of a complete kart vehicle. Conducted in collaboration with Autoeuropeo Motorsport karting team, the Tony kart Racer 401 RR direct drive model year 2024 is taken under investigation with the aim of figure out the vibrational modes with the corresponding frequencies of the chassis and relative fundamental components. Moreover, a model updating is performed by hand with the purpose of reducing the percentage of error between experimental modal analysis (EMA) carried out by means of LMS-SCDAS software and finite element analysis (FEA) made with LUPOS (by MATLAB software), to spot the right material properties of the analysed components as well. The study has started with the reverse engineering process of the main components, where a CAD model has been developed. Then, follows a numerical model generation of all the parts, for assessing the numerical vibrational modes obtained with the hypothesized material properties. With the Experimental modal analysis, it is possible to appraise the real vibrational behaviour of the numerical checked go-kart pieces and to make a successive model updating of the analysed components. By integrating in a single model all the previous numerical ones updated, the final go-kart vehicle assembly has been numerically simulated and experimentally tested. All the efforts done in this paper, lead to pave the way for a following work oriented to the evaluation of the dynamic behaviour, integrating the results obtained into a multi-body system. Indeed, the multi-body numerical analysis of a go-kart is focused on the evaluation of the vehicle dynamics performance sensibility with respect to the stiffness of its main structural components. For this reason, the structural behaviour of these elements has been in deep analysed in this work.