Performance of rear under-ride protection device (RUPD) during car to heavy truck rear impact

Abstract

Passenger vehicles crashes with Under-ride rear end of heavy vehicles result in fatal injuries due to sliding of passenger car beneath heavy trucks frames. This is related to an improper structure design of rear under-ride protection device (RUPD) that is mounted to the rear of the heavy vehicles. The design of effective RUPD must be taken into consideration during the design stage of truck chassis frame. There are two types of analyses used to investigate the performance of trucks RUPDs such as experimental tests and numerical analysis or simulation. This review aims to discuss the available research methods on the performance of RUPDs during car to heavy truck rear impact, and record their lack and potential areas. Moreover various crash velocities will be discussed for the car-to-heavy truck rear impact tests, as well as different scales of car frontal crash tests are included. Furthermore energy absorption capability of different truck RUPDs designs will be presented in this paper.