A Study On Car Body Safety Performance, Structural Design And Occupant Injury Protection In Side Impacts

As car sales in China increased to the highest in the world, the number of deathscaused by traffic accidents has also grew to over10million people. Side impactincidents account for approximately30%of the total number of accidents, but theresulting injury rate and death rate ranks first among car collisions. Therefore, toimprove vehicle occupant safety, and to minimize injury risk in side impact incidents,is becoming the primary task of vehicle design.Firstly, there comprehensive comparison was made of the side impact regulationsin China, Europe, and the United States. The new car assessment procedures and testmethods, the representative standards and direction of development of new standardswere researched and analyzed. At the same time based on a general method of vehicledevelopment, the side impact safety structural design was described in detail.This paper was based on an explicit finite element method for nonlineartime-domain problems, using HyperWorks before/after the processor and solverLS-DYNA970to establish the actual models for a side impact finite element model. Asimulation analysis was carried out based on the side impact requirements of C-NCAP.Results from the base model showed that the car body door seal was deformed, the Bpillar was bent excessively the door structure intrusion velocity was too large, and theB pillar had local issues such as excessive intrusions etc. Therefore an optimizationanalysis was conducted in terms of the aforementioned problems. Measures to moreeffectively protect the crew from damage were proposed and their validitytheoretically verified. This provided a reference for the improvement of side impactsafety design.Finally, the C-NCAP test thoroughly validated the results from the early stagesimulation model, and at the same time conducted an in-depth analysis of the test data.According to the diagnostic test results, the pre-simulation model was furthervalidated, so that the simulation model after further validation is a closer match to thetest results. Then, the validated model was used to further optimize the structure andside impact crash test safety verification, the final optimized program crash testresults showed that the model of the C-NCAP side impact score was close to themaximum and fully met the design targets that were set.