Design Methods Meeting Worldwide Occupant Safety Requirements for Side Impact

A growing set of barrier tests has to be taken into account to design side impact restraints meeting worldwide safety requirements. This paper shows an efficient design process to meet side impact requirements using smart testing and simulation.

While full vehicle FE structural analysis is widely used, model sizes have been increasing which prohibits efficient design optimisation. The use of Prescribed Structural Motion (PSM) provides an efficient alternative for restraint optimisation. The objective in a typical PSM simulation is to approximate a complex (CPU expensive) loading scenario by prescribing (a part of the) structural nodal positions in time. Results show that design modifications based on MADYMO PSM simulation provide the expected safety performance in hardware testing. Furthermore, it will be shown that the ModeFRONTIER optimisation and stochastics can be effectively used to optimize the design while taking design robustness into account.