Design of Outer Hood Panel of Local Compact Suv to Achieve Better Pedestrian Safety using Finite Element Modeling

Abstract

Traffic accidents are terrible scourge that occur in many countries, specially for developing countries where transportation affairs like tangled yarn. Besides functioning as an engine compartment cover, the hood of modern compact SUV can also help to manage the impact energy of a pedestrian’s head in a vehicle-pedestrian impact. This paper presents a compact SUV outer hood design that has a potential to improve hood’s ability and also to absorb the impact energy of a pedestrian’s head. The developed method for the design of a hood configuration aims to provide a robust design and homogeneous of Head Injury Criterion (HIC) for impact position at WAD 1000 and three different thicknesses (1.25 mm, 1.35 mm & 1.50 mm) of outer hood panel of local compact SUV, taking into consideration the limited space available for deformation. The non-linear Finite Element Analysis (FEA) of ANSYS software (Expilit Dynamics) was used in this research to simulate the testing procedurs of head impact for child pedestrian. The results show that a minimum of deformation space meet the requirement for HIC value which required to obtain robust and homogeneous head impact performance. Hood thickness and materials were identified as the main factors to influence the stress and HIC value of the hood. By comparing all models, magnesium alloy (non linear) (1.25 mm) was selected as the best models which greatly improved up to 29.46% for the pedestrian safety.