Abstract
For improving high-safety, convenience, and ride comfort, the automotive design suffers from the radical increase of weight, the recycling-related rules, regulations on waste gas, and the environmental protection of resources etc. Among them, it is well known that the weight increase is more critical. Thus, in order to minimize the weight of the body-in-white that takes up 20-30% of the whole weight of the automobile, most automotive manufacturers have attempted to develop the aluminum intensive body-in-white using an aluminum space frame. In this research, the crush test and simulation for the aluminum extrusions are performed to evaluate the collapse characteristics of that light weighted material. Also, the same test and simulation was done for the aluminum extrusions filled with the structural foam. Then, these results are analyzed and compared. From these studies, the effectiveness of structural foam is evaluated in improving automotive crashworthiness.
Finally, the design strategy and guideline of the structural form are suggested in order to improve the crashworthiness for aluminum space frame in the vehicle