For vehicle frontal crash simulation, Nissan has been using a relatively simple lumped mass-spring simulation combined with an in-house frame crash program CRAFT. However, it has been recognized that this procedure does not always have capability to simulate frontal crash responses for vehicle structural design changes directly. Thus, as an alternative to this conventional method, a commercial nonlinear dynamic finite element program PAM-CRASH has been introduced and researched to simulate vehicle crash characteristics using that program run on a super computer. A step-by-step approach was taken to simulate a test vehicle crash response starting with its front side rail crash simulation, and finally, the simulated deceleration of the test vehicle was successfully correlated with its actual crash test result. The major issues to be solved in Nissan's further study will be model simplification and application of this simulation method to various types of test vehicles. (A) For the covering abstract of the conference see IRRD 837684.
Abstract