Abstract
Keywords: crash simulations, car components, acceleration time profile
In the automotive industry more and more attention is devoted to the safety of all the traffic participants, the ones inside and the ones outside the vehicle. As a result, vehicle built-in safety is becoming one of the most important properties of new vehicle models from all automotive producers, who consequently transmit the demands for safer parts to their tier-one suppliers. If the tier-one supplier wishes to stay competitive, it must follow the trends and developments in the area of passive safety and gain the knowledge that will enable it to offer safer products. Safe products are those products that will reduce the consequences of the accident to the people because of the products´ design, shape, material selection or any other characteristics. For these reasons we have decided that it is finally time that we built our own universal test rig, which will enable us to validate the already-performed numerical crash simulations of car components and sub-assemblies and, most importantly, it will enable us to simulate crash conditions on the car components and subassemblies that are similar to those that appear during full-scale car-crash tests.