Week 11 Car Crash simulation

• Objective:-

To simulate an explicit dynamics problem of a car crash simulation, and to study the results for three different thicknesses of the car body.

• Model Details:-

A half model of car and wall is used for the simulation as shown above, to reduce the number of elements and thereby the computation time. Model is meshed in such a manner that the number of elements are below 24000, so even with academic version the simulation can be carried out.

Car is applied Stainless Steel NL material from the Non-linear materials library. As we are using half model, a symmetry region is defined for both car and the wall.

Parametric study is carried out by changing the thickness parameter of the car body and the maximum total deformation and the maximum equivalent stress values are compared in the parametric study. In the study, thickness of 0.3 mm (Case1), 0.5 mm (Case2) and 0.6 mm (Case3) are applied.

• Loads and Constraints:-

Car is applied fixed support and the wall has been applied a displacement of 500 mm towards the car. In the analysis settings, the end time is set at 0.001 seconds.

• Results:-

A compiled result for all the three cases is as shown below,

Case1:-

Total deformation animation link = https://youtu.be/4DLp2mjJ0e8

Case2:-

Total deformation animation link = https://youtu.be/wdd8Q8P4HNg

Case3:-

Total deformation animation link = https://youtu.be/23omjn3HElY

• Conclusion:-

In conclusion, we have successfully simulated the car crash scenario, with three different thickness as parameter and compared the total deformation and equivalent stress.

From the results, we can see that, as the thickness of the car body increases its maximum deformation reduces. These are expected, since by increase in thickness the rigidity of the car body increases.