Present day advancement in numerical solutions and advanced computational power has given a new dimension to the design and development of new products. Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) is widely used in the automotive community to reduce testing, prototype building, and design improvement in the design cycle. This paper provides the details of work done to improve the vehicle performance in Offset Deformable Barrier (ODB) crash as stipulated in ECE R94, using CAE with a challenge of achieving this with doing minimal changes in exiting vehicle design and minimal mass addition, so as to limit the additional cost, mass, and without any degradation in vehicle performance.
Finite Element Method (FEM) was used to carry out the full vehicle simulation, evaluation and study the effect of design modifications. Design modifications were aimed to get controlled energy absorption, stable passenger compartment with aim of reduced intrusions and occupant safety, deceleration pulse within safe limits, reduced steering wheel intrusions and overall stable vehicle response.
As per the approach taken for the task, work was broadly divided into three phases.
In First Phase Finite element model was build and the base model was analyzed for its performance. In second phase design modifications to improve the performance was carried out. Finally in third phase prototype of the vehicle, with all the modifications was built and physical test was carried out as per ECE R94.
With all the design modifications significant improvement in ODB crash was achieved, which was very well verified and correlated with the physical test. Test and FEM results showed very good correlation in terms of the vehicle deformation pattern, deceleration and velocity curves.