This paper was produced for the 2019 NAFEMS World Congress in Quebec Canada

Resource Abstract

One of the recurrent accidents produced in buses is the frontal crash against vehicles and obstacles, because of these injuries and deaths occur both of the occupants and the driver. Much of the bus safety regulations are mainly concerned with providing safety to the occupants, therefore the passive safety of the driver is relegated. There are several works about occupants of the cabin of commercial vehicles with the international Regulation ECE R 29 and to the absence of a specific norm for vehicles of transport of people; it has been chosen to apply the mentioned norm. The investigation is based on the nonlinear explicit dynamic simulation of a frontal impact of the front section of a bus using the finite element method to analyse the resistance of different structural configurations and verify that no body component is exposed to a dummy which represents the driver's survival space. To carry out the simulation, the geometry of the main components of the bodywork was generated; the mechanical properties of the material and boundary conditions for recreate the event were assigned the closest to reality. Then it was determined that structural elements are more affected during the crash in order to modify their characteristics and create models that can be evaluated under the same test conditions. The first analysis that represents the real model was validated numerically and it is observed that it does not comply with the regulation, for this reason various models are created until finding an appropriate structural arrangement that does not invade the survival space. The proposed configuration is composed of triangular plates and reinforcements with Thin-walled tubular in the central gantry, in such a way that after the impact there is a sufficient separation between the steering wheel and the dummy. It is recommended that the manufacturer revise its designs, and implement m the recommended model that complied with Regulation R 29, this would imply an improvement in the passive safety of the vehicle and greater protection of the occupant.