Crashworthiness aspects of electric vehicle design

The awareness towards environmental conservation and protection emerges issues on new technology leading to the development of technologies that are more sensitive and environment-friendly. One of the ways to have cleaner and environmentally-friendly vehicles is to adopt the electric vehicle (EV) concept. EVs present a research challenge for safety engineers. The vehicle crash tests are complex and complicated experiments with large non-linear deformations. EVs are designed using conventional vehicle design strategies but do not contain conventional materials or structures hence it is crucial to analyse their crash behaviour. The conventional vehicle is used in this work as a donor for EV to identify expected deformation and acceleration loads from real crashes which will serve as lower limits for converted vehicles. This work lays down a novel procedure to select all the critical components in the process of conversion of a conventional vehicle to EV. The converted EV is checked against different load conditions as specified by Euro NCAP. A special load case of rear oblique side pole impact was introduced in this work to evaluate performance of vehicle structure in protection of battery pack. The entire work is simulated with the help of non-linear explicit finite element software LS-DYNA and ANSA as a pre-processor. The various results obtained such as deceleration curves, intrusion measurements, etc., and factors that influence vehicle crash simulation, before and after the conversion are analysed with an objective to improve the design of vehicle structure further to influence the overall crash characteristics of the converted vehicle.