Improvement of Vehicle Crashworthiness by Polyurethane Foam as a Highly Efficient Energy Absorber in the Side Impact Crash

Abstract

The most critical accidents are generally found by the side impact crashes in automotive and more than 30% loss of life due to road accidents using passenger cars and light trucks. Various assemblies introduced to attain safety by sidebars, crumple zones, crash cones and energy absorbing padding. But during event of crashes, generally foam used to absorb energy and also set to dummy motion. When vehicle hit on another vehicle, initially dummy thrown towards impacting vehicle, then pelvis of dummy hits doors panel and at this time foam will absorb impacting energy and helps dummy to move on opposite directions. The padding usually applied and located in the vehicle door for securing the pelvis, the abdomen and thorax area. The proposed work presented behaviors of polyurethane foam padding by quasistatic compression testing and observed under impact in simulated environment. Different combinations of foam material along with various density used for compression testing by universal testing machine. At last, composite polyurethane foam block III found as highly efficient energy absorber composite polyurethane foam for side impact crash. Hyper mesh used for meshing and LS Dyna represented material model inputs for dynamic impact testing