Numerical modelling of sustainable bumper beam system in automotive crash management system application.

In recent years, the automotive industry has been under strong pressure to reduce its environmental impacts. Regulators have sought to steer the industry toward "cleaner" solutions and more sustainable products. Without preparation, this situation could have a major impact to the Malaysian automotive manufacturers since the tailpipe mitigation strategy is not enough to sort out the environmental impact. From the automotive Crash Management System (CMS) perspective, the inclusion of new sustainable materials requires a complete car crash analysis. This is too expensive specifically when any newly extrusion based components are involve. Therefore, this research was conducted to explore the optimisation of a newly sustainable recycled aluminium alloys based bumper beam system for application in automotive CMS using the finite element method. The work was divided into two main phases; subsystem iteration and full vehicle model integration. The results were compared to the current steel bumper beam system. In the subsystem iteration, several designs were analysed in terms of maximum force and displacement. The chosen model was then integrated with a full vehicle model and tested at 15km/h and 56km/h load cases. The results showed that the proposed bumper beam system could meet the criteria set in automotive CMS. Further works are required specifically in terms of materials characterisation to optimise a better bumper beam design, and to fit wider applications, which can finally contribute to the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]