An Improved Rickshaw Van with Added Two-Speed Gear, Suspension, and Foot Wooden Brake

The rickshaw van is one of the key modes of transportation in many cities and urban areas that may offer a comparatively comfortable, quiet, and environment-friendly transportation system for urban and rural areas of Bangladesh. The existing rickshaw van had drawbacks in carrying capacity, inadequate brakes, insufficient gearing, smaller width of hubs, lack of suspension, and weak wheels. The primary focus of this research was to develop a rickshaw van at the Farm Machinery and Postharvest Technology Division, Bangladesh Rice Research Institute, Gazipur, Bangladesh for improving its performance and reduce drudgery in transportation without requiring significant changes to the structure of the existing rickshaw van. The traditional rickshaw van was modified with added two-speed changeable gears, modified hubs with enlarged width, two freewheel sprockets, suspension springs, UC pillow block bearing, and wooden foot brake using CADRA engineering drawing tools. Low and high-speed changeable gears were also added to the prototype of the two-speed rickshaw van. Dual freewheel sprockets were added to drive the rear wheels only forward direction to pass any obstacle. The spoke spans of the wheel hubs were enlarged to increase the strength of the spoke of the wheel to bear more shock load which increased the carrying capacity of the prototype. During the performance test, the wheel of the two-speed rickshaw van was damaged with a 500 kg load, while the wheel of the baseline rickshaw van was damaged with a 300 kg load. The safe load of the developed prototype was found to be 350 kg. The performance test revealed that the developed prototype provides satisfactory speed, easier motion control, and good scope for manipulating the shares of human effort. Besides reducing air and sound pollution, such rickshaw vans demanding less physical effort may provide large-scale employment in urban and rural areas of Bangladesh.