Car Crash Safety Design And Improvement Of Technology

Vehicle passive safety issue is a big and urgent problem for world-wide automobile industry to solve as soon as possible. Not only did the crash accidents bring great economical loss to human society, but also killed hundreds of thousands innocent passengers. The basic approach of protecting people from being hurt or killed in an accident is to improve crashworthiness of vehicles. This paper starts with discussing theories and methods for vehicle passive safety design, which included experiential methods, analytic methods, multi-body dynamics methods, crash test methods and the finite element method. Emphasis will be paid to the basic FEM theories and algorithms of impact problems. Topics discussed include the governing equation, element discretization, hourglass control, time integration, material model, shell element algorithms and contact-impact algorithms. For more reliable simulation results, this paper then conducts study on how to accurately get material model parameters by combining the FEM method with experimental method, and develops relevant material test machine and parameter calculating software. Based on that, basic typical impact simulation and test validation study are conducted. On the basis of the above work, the paper studies the thin-shell structures' crashworthiness, which was affected by the following factors : spot-weld features, shell thickness, cross-section and pre-deformation. As to vehicle parts' crashworthiness, the paper conducts simulation study of designing energy-absorbing steering system and adaptive airbag system. A practical energy-absorbing steering wheel is designed as an example. In further depth research, the paper suggests several inverse quantificational methods for vehicle crashworthiness design based on the ideal crash characteristics. The above theories and methods are applied with good results through several practical vehicles' crashworthiness design and improvement.