Through the last 30 years, vehicles have seen its safety increased massively, but consequently, they have also significantly grown in weight and size to accommodate the latest safety systems, including new crumple zones and structures to allow for more energy absorption through the vehicle. This has caused that those roads that were built more than a century ago in European cities are in some cases no longer fit for today’s vehicles, causing space problems in big and crowded areas.
The SALIENT project, a co-funded project by the European Commission, aims to make our roads safer and reduce serious injuries and fatalities. To accomplish this, SALIENT presents innovative structural and vehicle concepts that are safer, lighter, circular, and smarter. This project focuses on creating new technologies and is currently developing, validating and testing a light front-end structure (FES), to enhance vehicle safety. It has adapted advanced light materials, improved manufacturing and joining techniques, innovative circular design, and emerging active safety technologies to develop a smart FES with high energy absorption capability and to be adapted (prior crash events) with future mixed traffic scenarios to meet or exceed future vehicle demands in terms of safety, structural integrity, crash-worthiness, and compatibility.
This paper goes through some of the new FES active concepts that the SALIENT project has been developing for the past couple of years with the objective of creating a lighter and safer vehicle without modifying its size. It explains how the project designed and optimized the geometries of those components, how it has implemented advanced materials into those parts and the virtual assessments and crash-worthiness models that will later be correlated with physical crash tests.