A Method to Design Plastic Part for Impact Energy Absorption by Optimizing both Material Property and Part Structure

From the view of passenger's safety, high performance for impact energy absorption is required to the plastics interior parts of automobile. But it is difficult to estimate the performance without experience, because it is measured from the dynamic behavior of interior part at a collision. In this paper, the combination of numerical impact analysis and CAO (Computer Aided Optimization) technique is applied to optimize both material properties and rib structures of interior part. And the result shows that the part, which has a high stiffness and is made of the material of which yield stress and breaking strain are small, has a high performance to avoid head injuries.