Master thesis and internship[BR]- Master thesis : Improvement of tire finite element models for roadside safety hardware simulations[BR]- Integration Internship : GDTech

Abstract

For the last 70 years, the number of vehicles on the road has increased drastically and the safety of the passengers has become an important part of the design of the vehicles and the roadside hardware. Therefore, the need for crash simulations has increased as well since they are less expensive and time-consuming than actual crash tests.

Crash simulations are performed at GDTech to test and optimize roadside safety hardware. The vehicle models should behave realistically in order to reproduce as close as possible the results of actual crash tests. However, the current tire models are not able to represent the tire blow-out. This phenomenon corresponds to a rapid loss of inflation pressure due to the separation of the tire and the wheel and can occur when the tire impacts roadside equipment during crash tests. Thus, the main objective of this work is create new tire finite element models able to blow out during crashes against roadside safety hardware and assess the influence of this phenomenon on the results of the simulation.

The first step of this work is to create a new tire finite element model based on the state of the art of tire modeling for crash applications. Then, the behavior of the model will be assessed through several local tests (including only the tire and the wheel). This will facilitate the analysis of the tire blow-out. A numerical study will also be performed in order to improve the behavior and the robustness of the model.

In order to assess the influence of the tire blow-out on the dynamics of the crash simulation, a new tire will be created and fitted on a vehicle model currently used at GDTech. Then, several tests dictated by European standards will be performed to verify the behavior of the improved vehicle model. Finally, the simulations of a crash against a parapet will be performed in order to compare the behavior of the original and improved models to the actual crash test data.