Development of a Mobile Deformable Barrier as a Car Surrogate

The development of a mobile deformable barrier (MDB) for use as a passenger car surrogate in car-to-LTV impacts is examined here. Since data from crash tests are subject to variations in vehicle properties as well as variations in test configurations, it is likely that repeated identical tests utilizing nominally identical vehicle pairs will yield different results due to these variations. It is necessary to account for the above variations and the resulting response corridor in developing vehicle surrogates if these surrogates are to be used for evaluating compatibility.

Results are presented here for the ‘response corridor’ of a medium size passenger car, obtained from finite element simulation of car-to-LTV impacts with defined variations in the input parameters. An MDB concept is then developed to represent this ‘response corridor’ in impacts with LTVs.

A ‘representative passenger car’ and ‘representative crash configurations’ are defined from the fleet distribution data and the crash data bases in the US and an MDB is developed as a surrogate for this vehicle. The response of this MDB is compared in finite element simulations to that of car to LTV impacts.