REVIEW ARTICLE


A Numerical Investigation of a Novel Hood Design for Pedestrian Protection



Jing Huang*, 1, 2, Zhiying Liu1, Yongcheng Long1
1 1State Key Laboratory of Advanced Design And Manufacturing for Vehicle Body, Hunan University, 410082, China
2 Key Laboratory of Highway Engineering (Changsha University of Science & Technology), Ministry of Education, China


© 2014 Huang et al

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the State Key Laboratory of Advanced Design And Manufacturing for Vehicle Body, Hunan University, 410082, China; Tel: 86-731-88823603; Fax: 86-731-88822051; E-mail: huangjing926@163.com


Abstract

Currently the use of new materials is becoming even more prevalent in vehicle industry for the lightweight design purpose. The design of engine hood is very important for pedestrian’s safety during a vehicle-pedestrian accident. In order to improve the pedestrian protection performance of the new material engine hood, the radial stiffening rib structure and trapezium sandwich structure engine hoods were proposed in this paper. And an energy-absorbing structure has been designed on the strengthening hinge plate to reduce the pedestrian head injury further more. The simulation results indicate that with new structures, the new material engine hoods have more uniform rigidity and better energy absorbing ability, which would effectively reduce the engine hood intrusion and pedestrian head injuries.

Keywords: Engine hood, Lightweight material, New structure, Pedestrian protection, Finite element model, Headform impactor model.