Development of Simulation Technology for Impact Behavior of CFRP/Al Alloy Hybrid Beams in Side Collision of Automobiles

Abstract

Carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) laminates are used in various industrial fields because they have excellent properties in their specific strength and specific stiffness. The CFRP has a potential of weight reduction in the automotive structure, which can contribute to the improvement of mileage as well as the reduction of carbon dioxide. On the other hand, the safety issue in case of collision should be also clarified when employing the CFRP as automotive structures. In this paper, hybrid beams which consisted of an Al alloy beam and a CFRP laminate were examined by both experiments and numerical analyses as candidates to replace the conventional steel door guarder beam used inside the automotive door. The experimental relations of impact loading to the displacement for the Al beams with different thicknesses, widths and types of CFRP showed good agreement with those from numerical results. In order to increase the impact energy absorption, other hybrid beams were devised and calculations performed by using the same parameters in the same numerical method and their results also agreed with those of experiments executed after the calculation. These facts show that the numerical method developed here can be generally used for estimating the impact behavior of CFRP/Al hybrid beams. Furthermore, a suggestion for how to install the hybrid beam to automotive doors was proposed by the numerical method. As a result, the effectiveness of our simulation technology is demonstrated here.