Body in white optimisation in automotive industry and modelling of the front crumple zone

After the 1990s there have been many important developments regarding automotive safety, therefore security of passengers have become a marketing feature for automotive manufacturers. In recent years, with the emergence of a great competitive environment in automotive companies, many security solutions are offered to create a safe life cage for vehicles. One of the key points in the creation of a safe life cage is the crumple zone on the front of the vehicle. The task expected from the front crumple zone is the ability to absorb the forces that may occur as a result of a frontal collision in the event of an accident due to the high energy absorption capability and protect the driver from the impacts that may occur. In this thesis, five different front crumple zone models were investigated in order to create a safer life cage in automobiles. Optistruct was used for the application of torsion, bending and frontal impact scenarios in order to obtain multiple and continuous load paths of the vehicle. Based on the required load paths, the front crumple zone elements were designed by using Siemens NX. Creating mesh of the front crumple zone elements, defining the materials and creating the connection zones were made by the Altair Hypermesh software and the pre-processing process was completed. In order to better interpret the results, five different front crumple zone models were created and the Abaqus software was used to solve the models. The amount of energy absorption by each element, the total displacement, the level of the load transferred to the passenger compartment and the crush force efficiency (CFE) results were obtained from the simulations. Based on the simulation results, the diffence of material, the difference of wall thickness in front collision rail and "S" formed upper rail were investigated based on crush performance.