Abstract
While designing the vehicle for frontal safety performance requirements, the vehicle structure is developed first to meet the cascaded structural level targets. These are generally set based on regulatory requirements or benchmarking vehicle study to meet targeted vehicle level performance. Subsequently the restraints and other interior systems are developed to meet occupant’s injury targets. The structural targets’ setting based on benchmark information will not always be effective as the occupant injury performance depends on many vehicle specific aspects such as occupant package, column angles, seatbelt anchorage locations, available legroom, IP profile/stiffness etc. A detailed structural target setting process considering the above vehicle specific aspects is explained in this paper. This study focusses only on setting structural intrusions targets. DOE studies are conducted using LS-OPT to check the effect of varying structural intrusions on occupant injury performance. Prescribed motion modeling (PSM) and intrusion scaling methodology in CAE tool LS_DYNA and consideration of actual vehicle environment has made this study more accurate and realistic. This study is conducted on mid-size vehicle.