Front, rear and side impact analysis of backbone chassis of a compact sports car

Abstract The automotive chassis is the main load carrier and energy absorbing component in all crash events namely, frontal impacts, rear impacts, side impacts and roll over. It is important to have a strong and light weight material for the chassis. The purpose of this paper is to observe how a backbone chassis behaves during collision. This work involves static, dynamic and modal analysis of a backbone chassis of Lotus Europa, a compact sports car. Deformation, stress and strain distribution are evaluated and factor of safety is calculated using static structural analysis. In modal analysis mode shapes for different natural frequencies of the system are presented. Further, impact analysis performed using explicit dynamic analysis compares the deformation and stress distribution for front, rear and side impact for different impact velocities. Two materials namely mild steel and aluminium are compared for impact analysis.