Animation of Perfectly Plastic Vehicle Crush

A formulation for the perfectly plastic deformation of a unitized vehicle body is presented. The method is motivated by insight from a series of tensile tests on vehicle structure samples, both domestic and foreign. Based on the bounding theorems of plasticity, the method is carried out by searching for the minimum rate of work production for a perfectly plastic material in which the elastic component is ignored. A simple example is shown both analytically and numerically. Further development is outlined.