A COST EFFECTIVE FEA-BASED APPROACH FOR DEVELOPING COMPLAINT AND SAFE AUTOMOBILE

Safety is becoming one of the most important aspects of modern automotive industry to reduce the development and testing costs of new vehicles, it is advisable to use computational crash simulations for early evaluation of behavior of car under testing, that way the severity of impact parameters can be estimated well in advance of a real crash test and possible design changes can be easily evaluated. The objective of the study is to demonstrate the front crash, rear crash and side crash simulation of the vehicle against a rigid wall to examine injury risk and potential of safety. In this paper, simulations were performed with the explicit finite element Hypermesh software running on a multiprocessor computational platform to numerically simulate the crash test of the roll cage with a rigid wall. The acceleration, distortion and deformed energy at the frontal, rear, and side region of the vehicle are traced. A very good agreement of simulation and real crash tests results was observed, which in turn justifies the use of computer simulations in the process of development of an optimized structure of the vehicle. The design procedure follows all the rules laid down by FSAE rulebook for formula type cars. All the analysis were carried out in Hypermesh 13.0