DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF A MODULAR FRONTAL IMPACT TEST RIG FOR COMMERCIAL VEHICLES
About
When a commercial vehicle is in its prototype phase, several tests are conducted on the vehicle to make it road legal. One such test is the frontal impact test conducted on Light Commercial Vehicles and Heavy Commercial Vehicles according to Automotive Industry Standard (AIS-029). In this test, the vehicle's cab is tested for structural integrity in the event of an accident.
Problem Statement
After each test was performed, the pendulum structure gets bent, which increases the overall budget of each test due to rework or scrap.
MANNEQUIN PLACEMENT
A 50th percentile male manikin is placed on the driver's seat to check for proper survival space inside the cab after the impact.
TEST RIG SETUP
The vehicle is fixed in a position and a swinging bob (Pendulum) is hit on the cab.
The swing bob is made of steel with a mass of 1500±250 kg.
Method
An iterative method was followed in the designing process of the frontal impact test rig.
A root cause analysis was done on the bending issue of pendulum used for frontal impact and design changes were performed which eliminated rework after every test, cutting down each test's budget by 30%. The updated design was made modular, facilitating testing on the complete lineup of Ashok Leyland.
Conducted a Design FMEA with a cross-functional team while brainstorming all the ways each component could fail in the design and testing phase.
The complete frontal impact test rig was modeled using CATIA V5. The analysis was performed on ANSYS to simulate the loading conditions on the test rig during a frontal impact test.
Result
The final design satisfied both the requirements of being modular yet having better torsional stiffness from the baseline design. The re-engineered design had an improved bending stiffness of 10%, which reduced the budget of a test by 30%
