Estimation of Energy Distribution for Car-body Deformation

Identification of distribution of deformational energy for vehicle body deformational processes is a very important and difficult task in accident analysis and in safety car-body design. Exact estimation or measuring of the absorbed energy by the deformation is almost impossible, so we apply an estimation for this. The classical tool for this task is usually a differential equation based finite element method, which requires exact knowledge about the parameters. In the following we introduce a simple numerical model describing the changing of the energy distribution during the whole deformational process. The main idea is similar to a finite element method: let have a 3D rectangular grid on the car-body, according to the energy absorbing properties of the vehicle, so each cell is approximately homogenous. For For each cell a monotonous decreasing function is assigned , which describes approximately the rate of the absorbed and the input energy. For different possible directions of the impact we define different absorbing functions, and instead of the original input, we deal with its orthogonal components, so the final result then will be the sum of the particular result.