Optimum design of the energy absorbers affecting the performance of vehicle frontal impact

Depending on the increasing number of vehicles, accidents resulting in serious injuries and death increased significantly and this situation made it necessary to design and manufacture vehicles with extra safety cautions. The traffic accident statistics report prepared by Turkish Statistical Institute and Turkish National Police, states that there were 131.845 fatally injured traffic accidents occurred in 2011 from total of 1.195.172 number of accidents and the number of public injuries and deaths from these accidents were reported as 238.074 and 3835, respectively. The high rate of pecuniary and human causalities caused by the accidents cited in the report is another factor indicating the importance of design and producing safer vehicles. Frontal collision accidents are one of the most common types of vehicle accidents. In this dissertation, crash performances of the energy absorbers were investigated. For this purpose, energy absorbers with different geometrical characteristics were designed and tested by both numerically and experimentally. Main aim of this dissertation is to develop a new crash box which has better crash performances like initial design. It was developed new designs considering different thickness and geometry. The performances of the developed crash boxes were obtained. Key Words: Crash analysis, Crash box, Optimum design