Vehicle Side Crash Safety Performance Computer Simulation Study

Side-impact collisions are the second leading cause of death and injury in the traffic accidents after frontal crashes. Nowadays, a lot of safety apparatus such as side-impact protection airbags, side door bars and other protection techniques have been developed to provide occupant protection. Side-impact test of the vehicle is one of the key means for proving passive safety and postmortem safety after crash, which are very important targets for reflecting the safety of the vehicle. The passive safety research is mainly on decreasing the occupant injury in the crash, include body structure, roof and door strength, damping performance of both body in white and interior trim. This thesis researches on two main facets:1. To confirm the effectiveness of protection equipment installed in vehicles, studying two types of side door bars to select a kind of more prominent side door bar. Therefore, the dynamic response of the human body to traffic accidents should be analyzed to reduce the level of occupant injuries. Generally, the experimental method is complex and expensive. Recently, numerical crash simulations have provided a valuable tool for automotive engineers. This thesis mainly presents a numerical simulation to study the side impact crash. PAM-CRASH/VISUAL VIEWER is used as the preprocessor and postprocessor while PAM-CRASH 2G SOLVER is used as a non-linear finite element code. Established regulation of side impact vehicle model was studied at first, and then a side impact vehicle model is established. At the same time, some main contents such as meshes, material selection, contact, time step control are discussed.2. Presents full-scale side-impact finite-element (FE) models simulation- based on the Economic Commission for Europe Regulations 95- that simulate a side-impact accident. The analysis consists acceleration variety, force variety, energy variety, time step variety and so on. The procedure and the result of the simulation are available comparing with the regulated data scope and it can be used as credible evidence to prove the real car test. Additionally, occupant injuries were measured and discussed the human body's dynamic response to crashes. To verify the validity of the proposed crash test FE models, simulation results are compared with those regulated value. The comparison results indicate that the proposed crash test FE models simulation have considerable potential for assessing a vehicle's crash safety performance and assisting future development of safety technologies.