Passive safety regulations specify minimum safety performance requirements of vehicle in terms of protecting its occupants and other road users in accident scenarios. Currently for majority cases, the compliance of vehicle design to passive safety regulations is assessed through physical testing.
With increased number of products and more comprehensive passive safety requirements, the complexity of certification is getting challenged due to high cost involved in prototype parts and the market pressures for early product introduction through reduced product development timelines. One of the ways for addressing this challenge is to promote CAE based certification of vehicle designs for regulatory compliance. Since accuracy of CAE predictions have improved over a period of time, such an approach is accepted for few regulations like ECE-R 66/01, AIS069 etc which involves only loadings of the structures. In this approach use of numerical tools like Finite element simulation technique is allowed for certification purpose.
This paper describes the experience in use of CAE tools for certification of commercial vehicles for FUPD (front under run protection device) strength requirements as per AIS069 regulatory requirements. Paper explains about the CAE & test correlation process, CAE methodology adopted and the approach used for certifying FUPD models through FE simulations. Using this approach almost fifteen different commercial vehicles were certified for FUPD strength requirements saving substantial amount of cost and time involved in physical prototype tests.
