Study on Design and Optimization of vehicle crush box for reduced damageability and repair costs

The Indian automotive buyer is very cost-conscious and the hence auto manufacturers are striving to bring in low cost of ownership with high fuel economy. Other than Initial cost and fuel consumption of the vehicle, damaged parts replacement and reparability of the vehicle is one of the major concerns of the customers. In cities, as the traffic density increases, low speed accidents are commonplace. Low speed impacts may cause significant vehicle damage and injuries to the occupants. In a low speed impact, the vehicle must withstand the crash with minimal damage so that repair costs remain low. Most of the vehicles on Indian road, mainly in entry and mid segment level cars don’t have the rear bumper beam as well the crush boxes. Automakers eliminate the crush box and rear impact beam mainly to reduce the product cost, as rear impact safety norm is not a part of Indian automotive safety regulation. The purpose of the project is to make customer, manufacturer and regulation body aware the importance of having the crush box and rear impact beam in the vehicle, in India mainly in metropolitan cities lots of vehicle collisions occur at a low speed because of increase in traffic densityAs crashing of actual vehicle to design a crush box is not cost effective, CAE tools like Hypermesh, Primer, Ansa are used for FE modelling and model assembly. Ls Dyna Explicit solver is used to simulate the real time crash event.