Abstract
Once a crash is unavoidable, the emphasis is on protecting the occupants of vehicles from serious injuries and death. Crashworthiness research programs seek to use occupants restraint systems and optimise vehicle structures in order to minimise the severity of occupant injuries.
SENER and NIVISA have initiated a research program to investigate the safety in truck cabin crashes. The objective of this program is to explore the phenomenon in order to reduce injuries by eliminating geometrical and structural incompatibilities in the body of the new NISSAN cabin model TK.
This paper presents an overview of results and conclusions up to date, from the analysis simulation of test impacts on the cabin TK, according to the Swedish directive SS 2564. This standard concatenates three load cases:
Test phase A: A vertical load shall be transferred to the supporting parts of the cab through a suitable interlay on the roof.
Test phase B: A pendulum impact shall be directed at one of the top corners of the cab.
Test phase C: Another pendulum impact shall be applied at the rear wall of the cabin.
The technologies applied include the use of the program PAM-CRASH. An explicit code specially adapted to simulate phenomena involving buckling, high non-linearity such as elastoplastic material behaviour and complex contact conditions, besides very large displacements.