An Automated Process for Interior Head Impact Analysis

During the last decade, the Occupant Protection legislation requirements on interior safety properties of automobiles have become considerably more demanding. The US standard laboratory test procedure FMVSS201U regulates the tests for the head protection against the event of its impact on the upper interior roof. The procedure involves the identification of the most critical target zones and headform target angles. To minimize the need for physical tests, the product performance evaluations are, as far as possible, performed with numerical simulations involving CAE software. However, covering all possible load cases would require an infinite number of simulations. In order to automate the generation of input data and to assist in finding the critical load parameters, Volvo Cars Safety Centre and BETA CAE Systems employed a process that involves ANSA pre- SURFHVVRU DQG (7$ SRVW-processor, extended with special tools. This automated process starts with the model file input to ANSA and concludes with the assessment of the LS-'<1$ UHVXOWV ZLWKLQ ü ù requiring minimum human interaction. An advanced algorithm, for the automatic headform positioning, which identifies the areas where the maximum vertical angle can be reached, has been developed. The process also involves a robustness analysis for each target point, and thus reduces the uncertainty of the problem. This has been successfully deployed within Volvo Cars Safety Centre, leading to great reduction of modelling time