LPV type model of deformational force in vehicle collisions

Modeling of the deformational force and absorbed energy plays a very important role in different fields of vehicle engineering. The usually applied FEM based methods give good approximations, but they have extremely large computational complexity. On the other hand there exist simple force models, but they not approximate well in details the real data. The aim of this paper is to introduce a force model for vehicle deformation, which is able to describe the real process and have acceptable complexity.

I. Introduction

Modeling of vehicle deformational processes plays a very important role in the field of accident analysis, accident re-construction, crash analysis and in developing passive vehicle safety systems. In the engineering practice in general a kind of finite element method (in usually a commercial software) is applied to simulate the deformational process. The main disadvantages of these approaches that require a lot of detailed data about the small parts of the vehicle, for example elasticity, stiffness, etc. These parameters are usually unkown, but if we know all of the necessery parameters, then we have to deal with a very complex system of nonlinear partial differential equations, in which the characteristics of the material depend on the orientation and change during the deformation process. There are commercial softwares which are able to handle this kind of problems, but they have extremely large computational complexity.