Integration of Hydroforming Analysis of Front-End Structures Into Full Vehicle Crash Analysis

Changes in gauge and material properties are the trademarks of hydroforming process used for any parts. These changes may be large enough to affect the vehicle responses under impact loading in a significant way. An investigation was carried out to determine how full vehicle crash responses are affected by these changes and the findings are reported in this paper. Key to this study has been a methodology to map the gauge and property changes, obtained from a forming simulation, to FEA models created for crash analyses. The mapping process thus allows one to consider the property and gauge changes as an initial condition during crash simulation. A number of full vehicle crash simulations were conducted and the results are compared with the corresponding test data. The entire procedure has been verified using the CAE models developed for simulating hydroforming and frontal impact behavior of a vehicle program. The implementation of the developed methodology to other vehicle programs is straightforward.