Study of a frontal bus impact against a rigid wall

摘要

Nowadays, the improvement of bus passenger safety regarding accidents is an important topic because new vehicle designs have tried to provide passengers with more comfort or better aerodynamic performance which may, however, compromise structure rigidity and consequently affect safety against crashes. Thorough requirements concerning passenger safety are applied through standards in the United States and in some European countries, differently from other countries such as the countries of the Mercosur, for instance. As an attempt to fill in those gaps, earlier important efforts have been made in bus simulations, which is a very complex problem. The present paper aims mainly to look into the behavior of this kind of structure upon a frontal impact against a rigid target. Experimental and theoretical predictions of the collapse of basic bus structure elements were performed to adjust the numerical models. Two numerical models based on different hypothesis and with distinct complexity levels were developed to simulate the frontal impact of the bus and good correlation between the results was found.