Passive Safety Analysis for the Commercial Vehicle Cab after Weight-Reduction Design

Lighter weight commercial vehicles facilitate faster transport, higher mobility and fuel conservation. Weight reduction and safety are mutually competing objectives. And the safety should not be compromised after weight reduction. Full size crash tests are expensive and time consuming to organize. Using a numerical simulation for predicting crash to the occupants’ safety can minimize the number of such trials. In this paper three virtual crash simulations for the three load cases: Front impact test, Roof strength test and Rear wall strength test are performed according to the European regulation ECE-R29. The explicit finite element program LS-DYNA is used for that purpose. The comparisons between simulation results and test data available in the literature are also presented in this paper.