Advanced Simulation Techniques for Low Speed Vehicle Impacts

During recent years the development of new vehicles has had to cope with continuously emerging requirements, implemented by new legislations and consumer tests (e.g. EuroNCAP) to insure occupant and pedestrian protection as well as new insurance classification tests to improve passenger car damageability and repairability. In a low speed vehicle impact performed to assess the insurance classification, the damage to the structure of the vehicle should be minimal in order to reduce the repair costs and consequently achieve a lower insurance category. The bumper system is responsible for absorbing the kinetic energy of the vehicle during a low speed impact, and at the same time no other structural parts should be damaged. In addition, there is a target conflict between low speed and other vehicle load cases as well as current styling philosophies so that the bumper system has to satisfy many challenging requirements. The following paper focuses on low speed crash giving an overview of the actual load cases, describing the requirements that a modern bumper system has to fulfil. Advanced techniques are presented from the importance of the mesh quality through to detailed modelling of some key parts to improve the vehicle performance.