A number aluminum structured passenger cars have been developed and introduced into the market place with weight savings of 45-50 percent compared with conventional steel structured cars. The aluminum sheet and extrusion materials that have been developed for automotive body structure applications absorb vehicle kinetic energy from severe collision events by material folding in just the same way as the steels that are used today in vehicle construction. Typically, the aluminum materials are used at gauges 50 percent thicker than mild steel and this increased thickness results in more material deformation in the folding process. This offsets the higher strength of steel and allows aluminum beams in both axial and bending collapse to absorb the same amount of crash energy as steel at weight savings of 45-50 percent. Design guidelines have been developed for energy absorbing members for both unibody sheet and extruded space frame structures and various modeling techniques have been developed to predict the energy that aluminum box beams will absorb. These allow affective design to be quickly developed without the need for exploratory building and testing. Published crash test results at 55km/h for two typical aluminum structured cars, one of unibody construction and the other a space frame design, show that these have excellent crashworthiness. In fact, both these aluminum structured cars well exceeded the US FMVSS 208 30mph (48.3km/h) occupant crash protection requirements, evens at the higher test speed used.
Crashworthiness of aluminium structured vehicles
1998
10 Seiten, 7 Bilder, 7 Tabellen, 17 Quellen
Conference paper
English
Crashworthiness of aluminium structured vehicles
Automotive engineering | 1998
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|Crashworthiness of Aluminium Structured Vehicles
British Library Conference Proceedings | 1998
|Crashworthiness of Aluminium Structured Vehicles
British Library Conference Proceedings | 1998
|Crashworthiness of Aluminum Structured Vehicles
British Library Conference Proceedings | 1998
|