Collapse analysis of spot welded thin section members in a vehicle body structure at various impact velocities

Abstract

The spot welded sections of automobiles such as the hat and double hat section members, absorb the most of the energy during the front-end collision. The purpose of this study was to analyze the collapse characteristics of spot welded section members with respect to the pitch of spot welds on flanges, through impact experiments and computation for para-closed sections and perfectly closed sections. The hat shaped section members were tested at the impact collapse velocities of 4.72 m/sec, 6.54 m/sec and 7.19 m/sec and double hat shaped section members were tested at the impact collapse velocities of 6.54 m/sec, 7.19 m/sec and 7.27 m/sec. A commercial LS-DYNA3D was used to simulate the collapse behavior of the hat and double hat shaped section members. The validity of the simulation was to be proved by comparing the simulation results and the experimental results.