Abstract
More and more high performance of racing cars induces, during the designing, to consider the driver safety as a growing important parameter. In particular, to reduce the crash damage it is necessary to absorb and to dissipate energy in limited time and space, keeping stress and strain in the cockpit below a defined safety threshold. Racing car manufacturers make financial efforts to search solutions that satisfy safety rules. Finite Element Method (FEM), employed to design formula cars, could allow to have, in an economic way, a sufficiently defined and careful preliminary design of the chassis. In such a way the more expensive experimental tests should be required only in the final stage of the design.
The aim of this paper is to put right, using experimental data, a suitable numerical model to simulate the crash behavior of a racing car nose-box. The simulation has been performed, according to safety rules, by an explicit FE code, on the nose-box of a Formula Indy car made by Dallara Automobili. In order to evaluate the model reliability, numerical results have been compared with experimental data.