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Development of a Composite Front Structure for Automotive Crashworthiness


 This paper will summarize the results of a major project of the Automotive Composites Consortium (ACC) to focus on the use of composites in a vehicle front-end structure. The emphasis of the project was to replace the entire steel front structure of a production automobile with a molded composite front structure. The project focused on the development of a completely new reinforcement architecture which emphasized production feasible preforming methods: triaxially braided glass fibers over foam cores make up the upper and lower rails and the connecting panel can be formed from either thermoformed continuous strand mat or directed fiber, and utilized an Resin Transfer Molding (RTM) process. The front structure of the vehicle was redesigned and replaced with production-feasible composite components designed for crash energy management requirements as well as other overall structural considerations. The paper will describe the many design, analysis and test phases of the project which led up to a successful barrier test to verify structural crashworthiness. A fully dressed and instrumented vehicle was built up to incorporate the composite front structure and the vehicle was barrier crash tested at 56 kph. The vehicle passed the test — all performance measures were well within the Federal MVSS requirements — and all but one measure yielded improved performance over the all-steel production vehicle. In addition, the composite parts are 25% lighter than the steel parts they replace.