Development of Vehicle Members with Spot Welded Thin-wall Section for Optimum Impart Characteristic -Based on Collapse Characteristics on the Varied Impact Velocities-

Abstract

This paper concerns the crashworthiness of the widely used vehicle structure, the spot welded hat and double hat shaped section members, which are excellent on the point of the energy absorbing capacity and low production cost. The target of this paper is to analyze the energy absorption capacity of the structure against the front-end collision, and to obtain useful information for designing stage. Changing the spot weld pitches on the flanges, the hat and double hat shaped section members were tested on the axial collapse loads in impact velocities of 4.72m/sec, 6.54m/sec, 7.19m/sec and 7.27m/sec. To efficiently review the collapse characteristics of these sections, the simulation have been carried out using explicit FEM package, LS-DYNA3D. The solutions are compared with results from the impact collapse experiments.