Abstract
Keywords: motorcycle, swingarm, finite element analysis
Design of motorcycle chassis and swingarm is often a compromise among different necessities: low weight, structural strength, high stiffness, handling and low costs. For many years now, in order to reduce the weight, aluminium and magnesium alloys and composite materials are employed to integrate and substitute heavier steel, using technologies previously engaged only in the racing industries. The main difficulty in swingarm design is to obtain the right balance between flexional and torsional stiffnesses. In this paper a swingarm model of a standard road bike was validated in order to define such stiffnesses.