An effective approach to prediction of the collapse mode in automotive seat structure

Abstract

Safety is an important issue in automobile design, in which the seat structure plays a crucial part. Engineering of the seat structure has a wide range of benefits for the manufacturer in the areas of cost savings and better design techniques. The seat in an automobile must not only be comfortable for the passenger, but must also be designed to protect the occupant from a wide range of impact situations. The seat structure in our advancing automotive world must also have a simple, lightweight design to keep down material and manufacturing costs. Despite the importance of seat structure design, many manufacturers do not have the time or money to perform an in-depth analysis of multiple different designs. The nonlinear behaviour of the seat structure forces engineers to use virtual prototyping and numerical analysis in its design. Use of a complex model and the long computation time of a numerical model drive up the cost and limit the turn around time in the production and design of an automobile seat structure. This paper proposes a cost-effective analysis of a seat system to ensure the safety of the occupants in the case of a frontal impact. In order to predict the major collapse mode of a seat structure in this scenario, the strength effectiveness of each component in the seat system is examined using a self-developed experimental procedure. To be sure of shear deformation of the inner track section of the seat structure, a detailed FE simulation is carried out, leading to an effective 2-D finite element method with plastic hinge to represent the major collapse mode. The simulation results are then compared with corresponding tests in order to verify their validity.