Improving crash worthiness and dynamic performance of frontal plastic automotive body components

Abstract

In recent years – demand from customers, regulators, and media to provide safer vehicles is increasing. This can be done by improving the current modelling and design processes and identifying shortcomings for early designs. In crash analysis, FEM plays an important role especially regarding ascertaining crashworthiness of a vehicle under different boundary conditions and material properties. In this study, FE crash analysis investigations related to available vehicle and vehicle with improved frontal car component viz. Plastic Bumper with three different internal designs are carried out in order to predict the design parameters for minimizing the harm to the occupants of the vehicle. Rigid wall and car’s frontal components are used to conduct crashing in line with the methodology followed in the four wheeler actual crash test. PTC Creo Parametric software is used for the modeling of the selected car components followed by FE meshing through Hypermesh and then analysis is done using LS-DYNA by setting the boundary conditions, material properties etc. appropriately. FE approach is used to simulate four different crash cases of the selected Four-wheeler and the results are obtained. Energy absorbing capacity and dynamic behaviour of three different designs of the plastic bumper and also the base model are compared and presented. The results are validated through analytical models and already published experimental results. It is concluded that the proposed energy absorbing designs of plastic bumper are effective and capable of increasing the crash worthiness of the selected vehicle as compared to the base model available in the market.