Abstract
There has been concern for the crash safety of one kind of minibus in China because of its short, flat front-end structure. The minibus did not have enough crushable space for a frontal impact, and it had, in fact, failed to pass the Chinese vehicle safety regulations in frontal impact tests. This paper presents a method to improve the crashworthiness and occupant safety of this minibus. The design method, consisting of component tests and finite element analysis, focused both on the crashworthiness of the vehicle structure and occupant safety. An optimised design was obtained. The improved structural design has been implemented for the minibus. The time and cost of the redesign has been lowered substantially with the help of component tests and finite element analyses. We have shown that these procedures were effective for improving the crash safety of this minibus for the Chinese market.
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