Electrification is the future of the automotive industry and with the rapid growth of Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV) market, battery protection becomes more and more crucial. Side pole impact is one of the most challenging safety load cases. Rocker assembly, as the first line of defense, plays a significant role during the event. This paper proposes Cleveland-Cliffs Steel Tube as Reinforcement (C-STARTM) protection as an application for rocker reinforcement. For a component level assessment, three-point bending is used as a testing method to replicate pole impact. The performance is compared with aluminum baseline with respect to peak force and energy absorption. Test and CAE simulations have been performed and a well calibrated CAE model is utilized to predict the robustness of various steel designs using different grades, gauges and geometries. It is shown that C-STARTM [1] protection is a scalable and configurable solution that offers superior performance in terms of peak force and energy absorption. In this study, the C-STARTM design with optimized gauges shows an improvement of 7.5% on peak force with competitive energy absorption compared to the aluminum baseline. It exhibits great potential to be used as rocker reinforcement and other structure components that have a long and near consistent section.
