Finite Element Modeling and Crash Analysis of a School Bus

This paper presents a recently built school bus finite element (FE) model and several analyses performed with it. The model includes structural features typical for a school bus and is aimed to be capable of providing representative results of the school bus dynamic response in different crash scenarios. It has enough degree of detail to provide adequate accuracy and reliability of the results and at the same time be feasible to run on the presently available hardware. The school bus model has been tested using the commercial explicit FE code LS-DYNA to represent crash events involving other full-scale FE vehicle models used as bullet vehicles. Events of different duration are analyzed: from several hundred milliseconds of a vehicle-to-vehicle rear and side impact crashes to several seconds of a school bus rollover. The described work presents details of the bus model and discusses some important aspects of the vehicle modeling. Representative results and discussions are also provided.