Improved Truck Model for Roadside Safety Simulations: Part II—Suspension Modeling

Abstract

The 2000-kg pickup truck is a very important vehicle in roadside safety research because it is specified in many of the tests in NCHRP Report 350. The characteristics of the pickup truck make it a very demanding crash test vehicle. Because the 2000-kg pickup truck is an important crash test vehicle, it was the very first vehicle chosen for development of a finite element model. The nonlinear finite element program LS-DYNA has become an important feature of roadside hardware design and analysis in recent years, and much of the success of these modeling efforts is partly caused by the availability of a good 2000-kg pickup truck model. Like all models, the model has evolved over the past decade. New features and improvements have been added continuously to the model by many different teams to solve specific analysis problems. One particular area where there has been a great deal of activity is in the area of modeling the suspension properties of the vehicle. Suspension response is particularly important for 2000-kg pickup truck impacts because the vehicle often experiences stability problems in impacts with roadside hardware. A number of improvements and modifications to Version 9 of the NCAC 2000-kg pickup truck model are summarized. These improvements involved changing the finite element model, changing element properties, and obtaining suspension response properties from physical tests. The 2000-kg truck model was then validated against a series of low-speed, live-drive tests with an instrumented pickup truck. The improved model provides more realistic vehicle suspension response than earlier models and should prove to be a valuable addition to future finite element modeling activities.