THE APPLICATION OF CRASHWORTHINESS TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF VEHICLE COMPONENTS

Recently numerical crash simulation of complex structures has been of significant interest in the automotive industry. The ability to efficiently simulate structural crash performance has been improved by high performance computer and efficient nonlinear dynamic finite element method. Furthermore this technique has been widely applied to the development of automotive structures successfully. Thus the development cost and time could be reduced tremendously. In this work the application of crash analysis code DYNA3D to the development of vehicle crashworthiness is introduced. The fundamental theory of vehicle crashworthiness such as the nonlinear discrete equations of motion are derived, explicit and implicit time integration schemes, and the hourglass phenomena due to reduced integration are discussed. (A) For the covering abstract see IRRD 880121.