This conference paper was submitted for presentation at the NAFEMS World Congress 2025, held in Salzburg, Austria from May 19–22, 2025.

Abstract

Road safety has increased steadily in recent decades. This is particularly evident from the number of serious accidents involving fatalities and injuries with long-term consequences. Nevertheless, further efforts must be made to achieve the ambitious goals of the EU's "Vision Zero" road safety initiative. The EU project SALIENT is intended to make an important contribution to the implementation of this initiative, particularly by considering the aspect of front-dominated crash load cases of vehicles of different classes (compatibility). In SALIENT various concepts for the redesign of front-end structures using innovative materials and manufacturing technologies are developed to increase crash safety while simultaneously reducing the weight of the components. In addition to a passive basic concept, innovative approaches based on active components are also being investigated. By means of ADAS sensors, the opposing vehicle can be identified according to certain vehicle classes such as small cars, trucks or SUVs. Furthermore, information is available about the opposing vehicle and the anticipated crash situation, such as velocity, impact angle and crash overlap. Based on these data, the stiffness of the load paths can then be specifically adapted to reduce the severity of the accident. One of these concepts is based on a fiber-reinforced crash box with embedded shape memory alloy (SMA) layer, which allows a stiffening of the crash box when activated. In this paper, this approach as well as the passive baseline concept are presented, virtually analyzed and evaluated for their effectiveness in several scenarios. In the first step the concepts are extensively validated at component level, supported by experimental data and finite element (FE) models. The understanding and verification of this behavior at component level provides the basis for the development of assessment methodologies at full vehicle level, which can only be investigated virtually due to their high costs. Alongside standard Euro NCAP crash load cases (FWRB, MPDB), additional scenarios are also considered that will become relevant in a future mixed traffic with autonomous and non-autonomous vehicles. The findings highlight the potential benefits of integrating advanced active systems into future front-end structure designs.