Design And Impact Simulation Of Automotive Energy-absorbing Steering Assembly

As the constantly increase of automobile quantity and car speed, automobile safety is so urgent to be put on agenda, and is becoming one of major research topics. Statical material of traffic accidents indicates that steering assembly is the primary component resulting in driver's injury in frontal impact.This paper presents the safety precautions of automobile crash briefly and focuses on the function, the principles and particular structures of energy-absorbingsteering assembly. Then, the famous problem solving theory──TRIZ is introducedgenerally and is applied on the design of energy-absorbing steering assembly: First, new conception of energy absorbing is proposed for traditional steering system. Second, the shortage of initial EPS assembly in frontal impact protection is put forward and the invention principles of TRIZ are used to make some improvement on it.Meanwhile, in order to compare the performance between the reformative EPS steering assembly and the initial one in energy-absorbing and impact-protection, impact simulation is done in this paper. The simulation is done according to the GB11557-1998 "The stipulation protecting drivers from being injured by motor vehicle steering mechanism" and based on the non-linear finite element analysis theory. The famous explicit dynamic analysis software ANSYS/LS-DYNA is used as the simulation environment.Some work is done to insure the precision of the simulation:Firstly, the humanbody model which is used in impact simulation is verified before simulation to make sure that its physical character, such as quality and distortion stiffness, meets the requests of GB11557.Secondly, great effort is made on the study of element selection, material model selection, model meshing and calculation control.Thirdly, identical modeling and meshing methods are applied in the simulation of the two above steering assemblies, so that the simulation results are comparable. Additionally, the simulation parameters, the boundary and initialization condition is identical, too.In the end of this paper, the results of the impact simulation of the two steering assembly are presented comparatively. Thereby, an analysis report is made.On the basis of the whole work of this paper, some viewpoints are made as a conclusion and an idea on how to bring impact simulation into the steering assembly design is proposed.