Simulation of Rollover with a Dynamic Roof Crush Test

Tests to simulate rollovers are currently very often criticized because of the nonreproducibility of the tests and their results. There are test procedures that attempt to simulate vehicle rollovers, for example, rollovers initiated by a ramp, rollovers initiated by inertial movement of a vehicle positioned on a slope on a car which is stopped rapidly, drop test of upside-down vehicle, and static roof crush test. In addition, another test procedure is used by Volkswagen. A flat impact plate equal to the empty weight of the vehicle is dropped from a defined height onto the roof of the vehicle. The vehicle can be mounted on a bed at various angles relative to the impact plate. The results with this simple test method provide a comparative scale for roof rigidity rather than an absolute comparison with dynamic vehicle rollover roof rigidity.

Besides the problems of conducting reproducible tests to simulate the deformation during rollovers, the problem of definition and evaluation of survival space is described. Based on the definitions that exist today, the paper concludes that it is impossible to define a fixed survival space for assessing the behavior of vehicle roofs during rollover simulation tests.