# Concept Design and Development of an Electric Go-Kart
## 1 Introduction  
A go-kart, in accordance with the definition given by the International Karting Commission-Federation International Automobile (CIK-FIA), is a land vehicle with or without bodywork, with four outstanding wheels in contact with the ground, two of which are steered using a steering wheel, while the other two transmit power. In addition to the engine and connected wheels, a go-kart chassis usually consists of a body frame composed of steel tubes that are welded together. The go-kart is a racing vehicle, small and light, powered mostly by an internal combustion engine (ICE), without a driver or with one person in it with no suspension. The go-kart is specially designed for racing and has very low ground clearance when compared to other vehicles. Many studies have been conducted on \"karting\" [1, 2, 3]. This includes studies on the design of the go-kart frame or chassis; at times, researchers were concerned about choosing materials for the structure--put simply, structure analysis, safety, and structure stability. The common parts of a go-kart are the engine, wheels, steering, tires, axle, and chassis [4, 5, 6]. The idea presented in this paper is a concept design for a chassis and other self-produced parts for a self-built electrically powered go-kart inspired by references [7, 8, 9], since the trend in chassis design involves producing lighter vehicle structures at lower costs but with good safety efficiency. As a drive, a brushless direct current electric motor (BDCEM) was chosen for this concept for, firstly,ecological reasons, and secondly, for its favorable torque characteristics, since it provides large torque at a low rotational speed [10; 11; 12; 13; 14; 15]. A commercially available go-kart most often has a two-stroke internal combustion engine as its power source, which is quite low in fuel efficiency and moment characteristics while also producing exhaust emissions and noise. Our motivation is to show an alternative to ICE-powered go-karts, the limitation of Li-ion batteries combined with a DC motor as a power source, and the details of designing such a go-kart [16; 17]. The chassis of a go-kart is mostly designed from circular thin-walled tubes welded into a frame, as presented in references [18; 19; 20; 21; 22; 23]. The stability of the tube wall is the detail for which the most attention has been given in the mechanical integrity \"domain\" [24; 25]. In an engineering sense, the \"local\" stability analysis of thin-walled structures is relatively difficult to conduct without the utilization of computer finite element analysis (FEA) programs [26; 27; 28]. The SolidWorks application was chosen for the modeling and analysis of displacement and stress in most cases. Every aspect of the vehicle was considered for optimization, so that the energy demand for a given race (drive) was minimal, as mentioned in references [29; 30]. One of the first issues in go-kart driving condition safety is the braking system design [31; 32]. Firstly, in order to have loads for any analysis, the driving scenarios of braking in a curved trajectory, acceleration in a straight trajectory, and the impact with (on) a road imperfection (a bulge or a dent) in a straight trajectory were chosen as extreme cases of wheel loads. The wheel loads were calculated based on the assumption of \"linear\" behavior, i.e., the vehicle chassis does not rotate sideways (i.e., rock) more than a few degrees in a curved trajectory, so that the initial geometry can be used in modeling a free body diagram and setting the equilibrium equations [33; 34]. As we advance in this paper, the wheel's normal and tangential forces are calculated with a predictor-corrector method [35]. Calculated forces are the base for a rear wheel shaft design and as load cases in the FEA model [36; 37]. The shaft's mechanical integrity depends on the load spectrum, an analysis of which is omitted here for the sake of brevity, and partially because it depends on the track configuration.