In developing the safety body structure of a small vehicle, it is necessary to consider both the body structure system and restraint system. In this paper, body structure system is discussed without changing the current characteristics of restraint system. In order to determine the crashworthiness requirements of body structure, the body is divided into two subsystems viz. engine compartment and passenger compartment. Deceleration Ge and Gc are intoduced for subsystems, while for total body structure, transfer function Dc is introduced. Thus, there exists the optimal crashworthiness balance between the engine compartment and passeger compartment. On the other hand, it is necessary to devise an analytical method to verify the requirements. Various analyses are studied. As a result, it is seen that FEM (Finite Element Method) is useful to predict the crashworthiness. It is also seen that the passenger compartment protection predicted from FEM is verified by testing the prototype vehicle. (A) For the covering abstract of the conference, see IRRD 837684.
Abstract