Designing for ‘Crash Safety’ is a challenging technical area for automotive engineers. FMVSS201 is a United States Federal Regulation intended to address head injury of occupants during a motor vehicle collision. This paper reviews the motivation and basis for the utilization of FEA techniques that are less expensive than traditional “explicit” methods to provide a qualitative assessment of intended design modifications to meet head impact requirements such as FMVSS201.
In the specific case considered here, the highlight of our work includes the mitigation of a three way discussion between Delphi, its customer and a third party supplier. The study concluded in proving that modifying the radio bracket; designed by the third party supplier provided the best solution in addressing the head impact issue.
Technically, this meant benchmarking the approach to address the physics of the problem, co-relating the analysis results with laboratory tests, and developing a first-order tool to provide indicative results, without going through the computational rigor of a full fledged LS/DYNA analysis.
This study considers a specific design, highlighting the importance of mounting brackets in reducing peak deceleration levels. The intent of this study is to bring out an economical alternative to repetitive testing and / or complex FEA using LS/DYNA when addressing head impact issues on radios mounted on the Instrument Panel (IP) of the Automobile.
The initiative provides judicious employment of FEA, in that it qualitatively predicts the performance of various design modifications vis-à-vis meeting the norms laid out by FMVSS201 for head impact situations. This study provides confidence to the design engineer to move towards effective countermeasure options required to pass the validation requirements.