A Concept to Design Crash Compatible Vehicles for Real Accident Environments

摘要

The presented research work aims at including partner protection more comprehensively and concentrates on developing the fundamentals of a methodology to design vehicles with optimised compatibility for a real life accident environment. Compatibility is regarded as a problem not only of one certain vehicle but also of the fleet it is encountering during operation. Therefore, compatibility of a vehicle can be measured quantitatively through the weighted sum over all injury severity scores of all involved occupants, statistically taking into account all possible impacts with other vehicles in the fleet Compatibility of a vehicle against a certain fleet is termed its fleet compatibility. Using fleet compatibility as objective function, a vehicle can be structurally optimized to achieve minimal overall injury severity. To actually calculate fleet compatibility, a numerical fleet model and an accident environment model have to be defined Fleet compatibility can be calculated, by numerically crashing the vehicle in question (subject vehicle) against the surrogates of the fleet. Due to limitations of the available computational capacity, highly refined FE vehicle models of the surrogates can not efficiently be used. Through further development of the beam element method, which was originally developed by Relou, the simplified models maintain all required features relevant for frontal impact and allow a radical reduction in the computational and calculating time cost. Among these simplified models of the surrogates, a model of the B-segment was chosen for the role of the subject vehicle. It was parameterized in its frontal structure to allow optimization. All the crash partners are termed the object vehicles Based on the GIDAS (German In-depth Accident Study) database, the accident environment in Germany can be described comprehensively and the model can be built properly.