Development of a Generic Vehicle Modelling Procedure

Fleet wide vehicle crash research requires a wide range of numerical vehicle models to simulate the crash behaviour of a real life vehicle fleet in crashes. Representative simulations of a vehicle fleet may require 10,000 till 100,000 crash simulations. This requires relatively simple vehicle crash models in order to obtain acceptable CPU times, in the order of minutes. The current used multi body vehicle models have a relative short CPU time (one hour) with a good representation of the frontal kinematics and global dummy responses including airbag and belt interaction, however there is a need for even less time consuming models with an acceptable accuracy for (frontal) impact. This paper describes a method to construct simple vehicle (frontal) crash models by an automated process with the use of vehicle measurement and test data which are available for other research purposes. Structural elements are selected which determine the crash behaviour of the vehicle. An algorithm is created which uses a geometry database to build specific vehicle types. These vehicle models are fitted and validated using crash test data. A midsize European vehicle model is built using this new methodology which shows promising results for usage in different crash research activities.