Performance of Hood System and Head Injury Criteria Subjected to Frontal Impacts

The aim of this study is to analyze the effect of steel and composite material on pedestrian head injury criteria of hood system. The hood is made of mild steel and aluminum, e-glass/epoxy composite and carbon epoxy composite are studied and characterized by impact modeling using LS-DYNA V971 in accordance with United States New Car Assessment Program (US-NCAP) frontal impact velocity and based on European Enhanced Vehicle-safety Committee. The most important variable of this structure are mass, material, internal energy, and Head Injury Criterion (HIC). The results are compared with hood made of mild steel. Three types of materials are used which consists of mild steel as reference materials, Aluminum AA5182, E-glass/epoxy composite and carbon fiber/epoxy composite with four different fiber configurations. The in-plane failure behaviors of the composites were evaluated by using Tsai Wu failure criterion. The results for the composite materials are compared to that of steel to find the best material with lowest HIC values. In order to evaluate the protective performance of the baseline hood, the Finite Element models of 50th percentile an adult pedestrian dummy is used in parallel to impact the hood. It was found that aluminum AA5182 hood can reduce the Head Injury Criterion (HIC) by comparing with the baseline hood. For pedestrian crash, it is observed that Aluminum AA5182 hood gave the lowest HIC value with 549.70 for HIC15 and 883.00 for HIC36 followed by steel hood with 657.40 for HIC15 and 980.90 for HIC36, e-glass/epoxy composite hood with 639.60 for HIC15 and 921.70 for HIC36 and carbon/epoxy composite hood with 1197.00 for HIC15 and 1424.00 for HIC36.