Study On Sedan Front Styling Features Based On Pedestrian Protection

Car styling plays quite a significant role in automobile development of earlystage. Aesthetics, market demand, aerodynamics and ergonomics are the commonfactors that are considered at the styling stage in the traditional automobiledevelopment, while the vehicle collision safety performance is usually considered inthe engineering design phase. If the vehicle collision safety performance can not meetthe design or regulatory requirements, car styling needs to be greatly modified, whichruduces the efficiency and economy of the product development. With theincreasingly high demand for car safety performance, especially after the launch ofthe pedestrian crash regulations, the relationship between car styling and car safetyhas become closer and closer, particularly pedestrian safety. Therefore, it should givefull consideration to safety at the car styling stage.Car styling features were taken for study in this paper. Car front stylingcharacteristics that impacts pedestrian crash safety were analyzed. Parameters andpictures of over100cars were collected as a sample resource, which had been dividedinto small, compact and high-class cars of three categories in accordance with therelevant classification criteria. The front styling feature lines of the sedan wereextracted for statistical analysis and parametric study. Sedan styling feature parameterdescription model was created by the styling features and feature lines, to give thestyling feature of crash safety properties and make the pedestrian protectionperformance of the car into the product styling stage. Meanwhile, according to thestatistics of the car the front shape characteristic parameters, a multi-rigid body modelof the sedan-to-pedestrian crashes was developed in the MADYMO software forsimulation tests. Due to the simulation results, quadratic regression equation forpedestrian protection was constructed to analyze the affection of the sedan frontstyling features to pedestrian injury, and optimization was done to design the frontstyling of the sedan with smaller pedestrian injury. The purpose is to control thecollision safety in the car development stage and to improve the car crash safety anddevelopment efficiency.Simulation results indicate that the bumper is the most important front stylingfeature to pedestrian injury in the sedan front styling, and bumper width is the stylingcharacteristic parameters which have the most significant impact on pedestrian injury. A low centre height and wide bumper are good for the protection of sedan.Characteristic parameters with significant impact on pedestrian injury are different inthe sedan front styling. At the same time, there are some interactions in characteristicparameters which have impacts on pedestrian injury. And the characteristicparameters of three sedans differ from one another. Through the optimization analysis,there is an excellent range of the front styling for pedestrian protection in the threetypes of sedans. The simulation results show that the front styling located in theexcellent range can reduce the pedestrian injury effectively, and have some value tosedan styling. Sedan front styling should give priority to the styling in the excellentrange.