Simulation Analysis And Research On Frontal Impact Safety Of A Miniature Electric Car

Nowadays, the frequency of extreme weather is increasing, thereby resulting in a great loss from air pollution that caused by human activities like vehicle emission which is one of the important reasons for the pollution. Therefore, people are tending to buy electric cars, because it is more environmentally friendlier. With the number of increasement of the pure electric car ownership, how to improve the safety performance of pure electric vehicles has become a very popular research direction.Considering the annual personal injuries and property damage caused by traffic accidents of traditional fuel vehicles, the safety of pure electric vehicles is referring to the crash safety.This paper aims to study the frontal crash safety and lightweight optimization of pure electric car, and to discuss how to lightweight the electric car without affecting the safety performance of the frontal impact, and the lightweight design of the key component of electric vehicle frontal impact of front side rail.This paper had established the finite element model of a pure electric vehicle,and the frontal crash simulation was made to the FE model, then comparing the simulation data with the experimental data to determine the accuracy of the FE model,then we made detailed analysis for key components of frontal impact, and had an overview of the vehicle crash performance, for the poor performance in the collision process of front side rail, we decided to optimize the design of the front side rail.In this article, we used a lightweight optimization design method of front side rail by considering the frontal impact safety and its cost control. First, let the inner panel and outer panel and reinforcing panel of front side rail be the the objects of analysis, then the material type and thickness of the three components were treated as discrete and continuous design variables, respectively, because HIC is an important index to evaluate the safety of frontal impact, the cost of the material as well as HIC as the constraint. At last, the Kriging method and the fruit fly optimization algorithm and the genetic algorithm were used to do the lightweight optimization design of front side rail. After determining the optimization method, the validity of the model was determined by comparing the acceleration curve of the simulation model with the acceleration curve of the real vehicle, then the simulation of optimization to front side rail was started. Comparing to the original front side rail, the HIC had reduced 0.9%,the energy absorption properties of the optimized front side rail had increased 9.65%,the weight had reduced 11.05% and deformation mode were improved, to some extent,the vehicle frontal impact safety performance was improved, also the lightweight optimization of front side rail had been completed.The results of this study also are of great value to other studies of components of electric cars.