Crash Structure Testing – From Low to High Speeds

Material behaviour at high strain rates is critical for applications in the automotive industry. Accidents involve high material deformation speeds which is essential to take into account in automobile design. Extensive data and constitutive equations are required for the numerical calculation of crash safety. The development of new materials driven by the lightweight construction trend requires comprehensive determination of characteristics to simulate crash behaviour.

Today, when material characteristics must be determined according to the loading rate, testing machines featuring servo-hydraulic drives are predominantly used. They allow tests to be performed easily and comfortably in a quasi static speed range up to 20 m/s as well at forces up to 160 kN.

To keep the speed constant during the high speed tensile tests, the control signal for the machine is adjusted to compensate for any undesired drop in speed. The force, the travel from which the speed is calculated, and the specimen strain are all measured and recorded.

Understanding the formability of autobody components under force application is essential when designing safety structures for protecting passengers. In addition to the typical high-speed tests for determining materials characteristics and the realistic crash tests on entire vehicles, low-speed crash tests are performed on crash-related components and structures. For loads with slow deformation rates, important conclusions can be drawn about the deformation behaviour of vehicle structures. For efficient validation of simulation results, ZwickRoell offers a flexible testing system that allows the damage initiation and propagation to be examined.