Light Weight Solitary Beam Design to Meet Low Speed Vehicle Damageability and RCAR Impact Requirements

Bumper systems play an important role in energy management during vehicle accidents. Bumpers beams are generally designed to withstand impacts of up to 4 km/h (ECE42, FMVSS-581) and need to withstand low speed 15 km/h offset insurance crash tests to determine damageability and repairability features (RCAR-42) of vehicle design. Globalization of Automotive industry is forcing the designers to propose those designs, which can be introduced, to market quickly and which have lower costs and better quality.

This paper presents work a novel design solution of a thermoplastic solitary bumper beam intended to reduce bumper weight and cost, meeting low speed damageability and RCAR impact requirements. A thermoplastic (PC/PBT) solitary beam is proposed that gives advantage of varied stiffness distribution along the vehicle width based on the impact requirements. Crash-Cans are designed at the corners and optimized for RCAR-42 requirement to insure minimum damage to vehicle front. Fascia supporting brackets are integrated to solitary beam and a single piece injection molded design solution is proposed.