Design and Development of Metallic Energy Absorber for A-Pillar

Occupant protection during interior head impact is a critical consideration while designing components like Pillar Trim, Instrument Panel, and Headliner. There is Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard FMVSS201 to ensure occupant safety during interior head impact. The standard necessitates the development of energy-absorbing component, material and trimmings for protection of occupant in the event of impact with components of upper passenger compartment.

This paper illustrates the efforts made in order to improve the existing vehicle A pillar to congregate the requirements of FMVSS201. In addition, it discusses the correlation, concept, design & development of a metallic energy absorbing component for A-pillar location in order to meet the occupant safety requirement during interior head impact as per FMVSS 201. The measures are aimed at absorbing the kinetic energy of an impacting occupant head with the pillar trims, in such a manner that the resulting head acceleration is reduced thus lowering the Head Injury Criterion (HIC) to 1000 or less as set by FMVSS 201. In order to make the design more robust, Design of Experiment (DOE), study of effect of forming and material yield strength on the performance of component and optimization of the component design is carried out with the help of computer experiments.