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As per WHO 2018 report, pedestrian fatalities account for 23% of world road accident fatalities. Every day 850 pedestrians lose their lives in the world. As per MoRTH 2018 report, 16% of road accident fatalities are of pedestrians in India. Everyday 64 pedestrians lose their lives in India. Based on accident data, one of the most common reason for the pedestrian fatality is head injury due to primary contact from vehicle front-end structure. Pedestrian head injury performance highly depends on front-end styling, bonnet stiffness, clearance with aggregates underneath the bonnet and hard contact points. During concept stage of vehicle development, safety recommendation on front-end design is provided based on geometric assessment of the class A surface.

Aluminum alloy wheels are being widely used in the automotive industry since the last decade due to its superior styling and performance. Alloy wheel rim is one of the critical components and plays an important role in a frontal crash scenario. The wheel rim failure prediction in safety simulation is essential to ensure robust safety performance. Determining failure characteristics of an alloy wheel poses many difficulties considering its brittle nature, porosity and inhomogeneity in material properties across different regions of wheel rim due to mold design, cooling rate and other process parameters of the low-pressure die casting process. This paper describes the modelling and simulation methodology developed to predict accurate wheel behavior. The methodology addresses two distinct areas of challenges such as alloy wheel rim failure prediction and associated tire blow out.

The vehicle crash signature (here on referred as crash pulse) significantly affects occupant restraints system performance in frontal crash events. Restraints system optimization is usually undertaken in later phase of product development. This leads to sub-optimal configurations and performance, as no opportunity exists to tune vehicle structure and occupant package layouts. In concept phase of development, crash pulse characterization helps to map occupant package environment with available structure crush space and stiffness. The crash pulse slope, peaks, average values at discrete time intervals, can be tuned considering library of restraints parameters. This would help to derive an optimal occupant kinematics and occupant-restraints interaction in crash event. A case study has been explained in this paper to highlight the methodology.