Impact strength and response behaviour of CFRP guarder belt for side collision of automobiles

Abstract

In automobiles, carbon fibre reinforced plastic (CFRP) has a possibility of weight reduction in automotive structures which can contribute to improve mileage and then to reduce carbon dioxide. On the other hand, the safety of collision should also be made clear in the case of employing CFRP in automotive structures. In this paper, the CFRP guarder belt equipped in the automotive door is developed and examined by an experiment and a numerical analysis for replacing the conventional steel door guarder beam. In the numerical analysis, a commercial FEM solver (ANSYS) was employed and the laminated shell element was used in the CFRP guarder belts. The contact element between the impactor and the upper surface of CFRP guarder belt, and between the supporters and the inner surface of the belt was No. 173 with the target element No. 170. The experimental relation of impact load to displacement for CFRP guarder belt agreed considerably with that of the numerical result. After the comparison of both the results it has been found that the numerical method developed here is quite useful for estimating the impact behaviour of the CFRP guarder belt.