It is difficult to make further advances in the use of metals to improve cycle costing, crashworthiness and weight reduction in the construction of modern transport vehicles. An obvious solution is to make use of composites and their inherent characteristics such as light weight and lack of ductile failure. To date insufficient consideration has been given to crashworthiness and this is limiting their widespread use. This paper addresses this shortcoming and the associated issues and discusses the factors that have been taken into account in the programme of work. The results will enable designers to reliably produce crashworthy composite structures. The HYCOTRANS Brite Euram project is built around this issue and the work will be authenticated by the testing of scale models and culminating in a full size crash test. For the covering abstract see ITRD E116488.
Samenvatting