Crash Simulation Analysis Of A Heavy Commercial Vehicle Cab

The promotion of the national economy and the improvement of people’s living standard have made the prosperous development of traffic transportation industry, but they also cause prominent traffic accident problems. Hence, it’s urgent to improve the safety performance of the automobile, so that passengers have enough protection when a traffic accident happened. Commercial vehicle has the outstanding feature of large overall size and full load quality, but it’s easy to cause fatal crash once a traffic accident happened,thus studying the commercial vehicle’s safety performance is an important research direction of automobile’s safety performance research. The publication of national standard of The Protection of the Occupants in Commercial Vehicle’s Cab(GB26512-2011) has shown national special attention on commercial vehicle’s passive safety performance.As the developing of computer technology, finite element method has played an more and more important role in the field of car collision safety simulation. Utilizing the finite element software to simulate car collision and design structure, can reduce the experiment times, shorten the development cycle and improve its efficiency. Therefore,the collision safety simulation has gradually gained special attention during the development of commercial vehicle. Referring to large amount of domestic and foreign relevant research materials, and based on national standard-the Protection of the Occupants in Commercial Vehicle’s Cab, this paper analyze the crash simulation of a heavy commercial vehicle cab by adopting the nonlinear finite element method.Firstly, import the cab’s CAD model into the HyperWorks software, and implement series of pretreatment, such as simplifying the model, mapping meshing, defining materials, adding connected relations and defining contacts, so the CAD model is transformed into a qualified finite element mesh model. Then set up the finite element model of pendulum and add the initial conditions. The positive pendulum impact experiment is simulate with the cab’s finite element mesh model. In order to further upgrade the positive impact performance of the cab, a suitable suction device on the dash panel of the cab is designed, and the cab structure is also improved. The result has shown that the improved cab has significant improvement on positive impact performance, which can meets the requirements of national standard. Lastly, the roof strength simulation and real wall strength simulation test are also implemented with the improved cab’s finite element model. Evaluating and analyzing the living space of the cab show that the cab has enough living space, which can meet the requirements of national standard.The related modeling and evaluation methods that used in this paper can provide certain reference and help for the future further comprehensive study of commercial vehicle’s collision safety performance problems.