Journals Proceedings

Abstract

Reducing the weight of vehicles is crucial for fuel economy correspondingly CO2 emissions. Therefore, Automobile manufacturers are constantly working on lightweight materials alternatively. Crashworthiness is another principal task for the car manufacturers. For this purpose, additional parts exist in the car body, such as frontal crash bumper beams, crash boxes, and side door anti-intrusion bars. In the presented study, the side door anti-intrusion bar was selected to analyze with different composite materials to compare to existing steel models by using Finite Element Method (FEM). The same geometry but different thickness for Glass and Carbon fiber reinforced thermoset, and thermoplastic composites were applied in the FEM simulations. Selected material properties were obtained from the literature. Simulation results were compared to find highest bending rigidity and energy absorption capability of the anti-intrusion bar in the same boundary conditions and loading. Analyzed anti-intrusion bar's CAD data and mesh structures were obtained by using CATIA and HyperMesh commercial software respectively. Abaqus dynamic/explicit FEM analysis were performed to obtain impact behavior of the anti-intrusion bars. The results showed that polymer composites had enough strength, rigidity and energy absorption capability to replace the existing steel model by reducing weight considerably.