Research Information System
(ICNES 2015) INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS ON NATURAL AND ENGINEERING SCIENCES, Sarajevo, Bosnia And Herzegovina, 9 - 13 September 2015, pp.25
Reducing the weight of vehicles is very important for fuel economy correspondingly CO2 emissions. Therefore
Automobile manufacturers are constantly working on alternative lightweight materials. Crahworthiness is another chief
task for the car manufacturers. For this purpose additional parts exist in the car body, such as frontal crash bumper
beams, crash boxes and side door anti intrusion bars. In the presented study the side door anti intrusion bar was selected
to analyze with different composite materials to compare to existing steel models by using Finite Element Method
(FEM). The same geometry, but different thickness for Glass and Carbon fiber reinforced thermoset and thermoplastic
composites were applied in the FEM simulations. Selected material properties were obtained from the literature.
Simulation results were compared to find highest bending rigidity and energy absorption capability of the anti intrusion
bar in the same boundary conditions and loading. Analysed anti intrusion bar‟s CAD data and mesh structures were
obtained by using CATIA and HyperMesh commercial softwares respectively. Abaqus dynamic explicid FEM analysis
were performed to obtain impact behavior of the anti intrusion bars. The results showed that polymer composites had
enough strength, rigidity and energy absorption capability to replace the existing steel model by reducing weight
considerably.