Structural Performance Assessment of a Chrysler Neon Compact Passenger Vehicle by Numerical Methods

Abstract

Crashworthiness of an automotive can be well-defined as its capability to defend its occupants and other accomplices, like pedestrians and other automobiles, complicated in an incident of impact. A crashworthy automotive experiences a precise quantity of distortion and absorbs impact energy in an incident of crash. An automotive acts differently in dissimilar crash setups. The variance may in the mode of distortion, the quantity of energy absorbed, the distortion occurred to the automotive body components and the motion of the automotive after the crash. As there are no procedures existing for defining the goals for the universal performance for a new vehicle, like energy to be engrossed, in the incident of a crash, these goals are usually well-defined by preceding knowledge of the design engineer at the start of design. In this paper a crashworthiness benchmark target is established by the numerical crash simulations of a Finite Element Model of a 1996 Chrysler Neon compactpassenger vehicle. The results of these Finite Element simulations are used for obtaining the basic information around the behavior of the automotive body structure in dissimilar crash scenarios. Thereby, the information attained is used for representing the procedure of defining the universal performance goals for the crashworthy automotive body structure.