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This paper describes a bumper system designed to meet the current FMVSS (Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard) and ECE42 legislation as well as the European Enhanced Vehicle Safety Committee (EEVC) requirements for lower leg pedestrian impact protection [1] (The EEVC was founded in 1970 in response to the US Department of Transportation's initiative for an international program on Experimental Safety Vehicles. The EEVC steering committee, consisting of representatives from several European Nations, initiates research work in a number of automotive working areas. These research tasks are carried out by a number of specialist Working Groups who operate for over a period of several years giving advice to the Steering Committee who then, in collaboration with other governmental bodies, recommends future courses of action designed to lead to improved safety in vehicles).

This paper will describe an approach to satisfying proposed European Enhanced Vehicle Safety Committee (EEVC) legislation for lower leg pedestrian impact. The solution for lower leg protection is achieved through a combination of material properties and design. Using Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) modeling, the performance of an energy absorber (EA) concept was analyzed for knee bending angle, knee shear displacement, and tibia acceleration. The modeling approach presented here includes a sensitivity analysis to first identify key material and geometric parameters, followed by an optimization process to create a functional design. Results demonstrate how an EA system designed with a polycarbonate/polybutyelene terephthalate (PC/PBT) resin blend, as illustrated in Figure 1, can meet proposed pedestrian safety requirements.

This paper presents results from a series of tests that address safety related issues concerning vehicle glazing. These issues include occupant containment, head impact injury, neck injuries, fracture modes, and laceration. Component-level and full vehicle crash tests of standard and polycarbonate non-windshield glazing were conducted. The tests were conducted as part of a study to demonstrate that there is no decrease in the safety benefits offered by polycarbonate glazing when compared to current glazing. Readers of this paper will gain a broader understanding of the tests that are typically conducted for glazing evaluation from a safety perspective, as well as gain insight into the meaning of the results.

A technique for estimating the lateral loads exerted on the vehicle frame during centerline pendulum impacts has been developed. These loads can either be determined by sophisticated hand calculations or by using beam finite-element analysis. The loads can either be determined as a fraction of the peak impact load, or as an absolute number. The dependence of the lateral load on frame stiffness, bumper cross-section, and bumper sweep will be shown to be quite dramatic.

The increased demands of today's complex automotive connector designs have led to the development of engineering structural analysis tools which address the performance issues of the connector's snap-finger. In designs where hand calculations were once considered the norm in evaluating snap-finger performance, the analysis tools have evolved into the use of finite element techniques which address the high nonlinearity issues of snap-finger disassembly and terminal pull out strength. The structural analysis approaches developed investigate the connector snap-finger performance in reinforced engineering thermoplastics while incorporating the effects of geometric and material nonlinearity in the results. The techniques developed allow for the evaluation of snap-finger performance of prospective connector designs before expensive tooling and prototyping is initiated, providing the benefits of limited tool rework and decreased product development time.