Development Of A Metrıc System to Evaluate the Performance of Passenger Cars in Frontal Crash Tests

Abstract

Passenger safety during a collision is a criterion taken into account in automobile designs. For this reason, it is aimed to design the vehicles in such a way that the people inside the vehicle, especially the driver and passengers, are least damaged in the collision. Some autonomous organizations subject new vehicles to tests to examine how well they meet criteria such as passenger and pedestrian safety before they are put on the market. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is one of these organizations. It evaluates vehicle safety from different aspects since 1979 under a program called the New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) [1] and then scores vehicle safety with a "5 Star" metric evaluation together with a detailed report. Crash tests are basically created by crashing the vehicle into a determined type of obstacle at a specified speed. Mannequins equipped with sensors called dummy are placed at various points in the vehicle that will carry out the collision. The scoring system, on the other hand, is created by scaling the sensor data levels of vehicle crash performance equivalent to serious injury in dummies. In the thesis, the crash tests made in NCAP will be done by comparing the sensor data taken from different points on the vehicle and from the dummies. After this comparison, instead of a metric system that gives a single total result corresponding to vehicle crash performance, it is aimed to evaluate vehicle crash performance with two different metric systems which are vehicle structural performance and restraint system performance. In the collision scenario, full-width rigid barrier collisions, defined as "full-width rigid barrier (FWRB)" will be examined. While the structural performance of the vehicle is defined as the concepts that absorb the vehicle kinetic energy with factors such as plastic deformation, vibration and sound during the collision, restraint systems will be defined as the factors that ensure the safety of the occupant with the aid of seat belt and airbag in the collision. While aiming to create a new crash performance score based on these two separate factors, new parameters related to acceleration and speed, which have not yet been defined for vehicle safety, are determined.