Design and Development of Truck Rear Underrun Protection Device

Abstract

Underride truck crashes occur when a passenger car rides under the rear of a large truck. These kinds of accidents are especially dangerous because of the size difference between trucks and passenger cars. Therefore, it is necessary to install the Rear Underrun Protection Device (RUPD) at the rear of trucks for safety enhancement. The aim of this research is to design an effective RUPD which is strong enough to prevent a passenger car falling under the rear of the truck and able to absorb large amount of crash energy to minimize accident severity. The novel RUPD design, equipped with energy absorption guard and proper support structure is proposed in this paper. The study on the angle and separation distance of support structures is performed to find the proper design for the support structure of RUPD. The internal energy and displacement of various design of support structures are investigated by performing Finite element crash simulation in LS-Dyna. The FMVSS 223 standard is utilized as reference for the standard design of RUPD. The result shows that the support structure angle of 20 degree yields optimal displacement and energy absorption. Moreover, the new proposed RUPD is able to avoid the A-pillar deformation and eliminates underride altogether.