Enhancement of crashworthiness in car-truck collisions using damped under-ride guard and composite crush elements

TL;DRAbstract

A systematic study is performed to understand the dynamics of collisions involving a modern light weight passenger car and a heavy freight vehicle and to design an improved crash energy management system to reduce the severity of collisions. A concept of an energy dissipating under-ride guard is analytically modeled and the performance potentials are investigated under direct and oblique impacts to enhance the crashworthiness of automobiles involved in collisions with heavy freight vehicles. The under-ride guard is analytically modeled incorporating non-linearities due to asymmetric damping, stiffness, clearance spring and kinematics of linkages, using the principle of conservation of momentum and Lagrangian dynamics. Hardware-in-the-loop tests are performed to evaluate the impact energy dissipated by the damper and to verify the proposed model. The performance benefits of the proposed guard are investigated using a performance criterion based upon the magnitude of intrusion of the car

Chat with Paper

AI Agents for this Paper