F2010C049
CAE Based Certification for Safety Regulations: Bus Rollover - A Case Study
India has been moving very fast in implementation of various safety standards as per the safety roadmap developed for Automotive Industry. This has lead to considerable increase in the development effort and certification effort. Implementation date for most of the regulations also includes sufficient time for the certification work as the time required for certification of all the existing models requires considerable effort.
CAE based methodologies for structural analysis have improved considerably and are now very commonly used for development of vehicle structures. CAE based methodologies can also be used very effectively for certification of products against safety standards requiring only structural performance. Use of CAE can very well address the issue of certifying a large number of product variants without the need for large number of costly physical tests. CAE can also be used for selection of the worst case variants, in case it is not clear to the testing authorities.
CAE based certification is already allowed in some of the safety standards including ECE R66 (Strength of Superstructure). This methodology was successfully used for certification of buses against similar requirements of Indian Regulation (AIS-031). The CAE methodology was also validated through physical testing as this is the first such instance.
The accuracy of the CAE models and proper modeling of the loading conditions is very critical. Correlation with limited component level physical validation was used to ensure the required level of confidence in CAE results.
Based on the above experience, this paper proposes a generic process for certification using CAE based methodology including the variant selection, worst case loadcase selection and the necessary physical testing for CAE Model validation. The paper then discusses various other safety standards for which CAE based certification is possible.
This abstract is supplemented by a PDF, which can be viewed here.
Session: Buses