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This paper introduces a development of pedestrian protection analyzing technologies and its practical application to an actual automobile. The analyzing technologies have two types, an analyzing tool for initial design stage utilizing Microsoft Excel and a crash analyzing software MADYMO, and a large scale FEM (Finite Element Method) utilizing a crash analyzing software PAM-CRASH. These technologies were applied to an actual car development to study the efficient structure. In this paper, a development of a bumper structure with high leg protection performance is reported. The developed bumper was tested and evaluated on an actual vehicle and was proven to have high leg protection performance. The leg protection analyzing technology could estimate the leg injury of a actual vehicle test within 10% prediction error.

There is a limit in expense and facilities to perform structural analysis by repeating crash tests using actual vehicles. This paper describes an example of crash analysis by FEM performed by our company, for frontal crash and rollover of a large-sized bus. Regarding the frontal crash analysis, firstly static collapse tests were performed using a scale model of the under-floor structure in order to get the deformation mode, then the structure was analyzed using an FE model. Secondly, an effectiveness of a full model that included the frame model was verified by a frontal crash test at 35km/h. Last, the structural improvement based on the full model was considered. Regarding the rollover analysis, since the event duration is long, a method to utilize partial body model instead of a complete vehicle was proposed in order to reduce calculation time. As practical results, the improved vehicle showed good performance satisfying the target level in frontal crash and rollover tests.