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Automotive Front Rail & Cutout Fender Apron: 600 mm Deep Crush Against Rigid Wall
Geometrically nonlinear kinematic crash crush of a dual-phase DP600 box-section front rail and curved cutout fender apron driven by a 600 mm prescribed Rigid Wall displacement with shell self-contact.
Automotive front crash structures combine a closed box-section lower longitudinal rail (t = 1.6 mm) and a curved upper fender apron panel (t = 1.1 mm) with three stamped cutout windows. During a frontal barrier test, the rigid impact wall advances kinematically by 600 mm along -X, progressively folding 48 bays (720 mm crush zone) into a 4-lobe concertina accordion while the rear firewall bulkhead remains elastic and undisturbed.
1. Geometry & FEA Mesh
- •Fine crash mesh: 2,638 nodes, 2,520 MITC4 shell quads (1,632 box-rail quads, 696 cutout apron quads, 192 Rigid Wall quads), and 110 edge/pillar stiffener beams (15,828 active DOFs).
- •Length L = 1,020 mm (68 bays × 15 mm); 48 front crush bays (720 mm compressed by 600 mm to 120 mm).
- •Dual-phase crash steel DP600 with secant elastoplastic modulus E_sec = 0.42 GPa (ν = 0.30) calibrated to plastic hinge flow stress (380–560 MPa).
- •Two-sided shell contact and accordion self-contact (nlgeom contact self=on twosided=on, 196 active pairs).
2. Loads & Boundary Conditions
- •Rear firewall end section at x = -1,020 mm fully clamped in all 6 degrees of freedom.
- •Purely kinematic prescribed displacement ux = -600.0 mm on the Rigid Wall at x = +3 mm (zero applied nodal forces).
- •21 equilibrium steps starting from the unloaded initial state Step 1/21 (λ = 0%, |u| = 0 mm, σ_vm = 0 MPa) to Step 21/21 (λ = 100%, |u| = 600.0 mm).
3. Simulation Results & Findings
- ✓Full convergence across all 20 nonlinear load increments (21 total steps including λ = 0%, 0 cutbacks).
- ✓Front nose tracks the advancing Rigid Wall with zero gap (exact 3.000 mm shell mid-plane offset across all 21 steps) and monotonic bay lengths (min Δx = 2.50 mm > 0, zero element inversion).
- ✓Peak equivalent von Mises stress reaches σ_vm = 558.7 MPa in the plastic hinges of the folded DP600 box rail (451.6 MPa in the cutout apron, 267.9 MPa in the top flange beam), while uncrushed rear bays remain at 0.0 MPa.
- ✓196 active shell-to-wall and fold-to-fold self-contact pairs; fundamental modal frequency f₁ = 23.09 Hz.
Enables rapid body-in-white crashworthiness evaluation of progressive rail folding, cutout window buckling, and self-contact energy absorption directly in WebCAE.
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- ✓Nonlinear Contact & Buckling (Kσ, MITC4, RBE2/RBE3)
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