Rollover simulation and crashworthiness analysis of trucks

The abstract refers to a computer-based technique for the dynamic analysis of multibody systems undergoing large motions and structural deformations. As a specific example, this formulation is applied to the rollover simulation of a truck (multibody system) to determine the deformation of its cab or safety rollbar cage (structure). For the multibody system, the equations of motion are generated in a systematic form from the data that describe the system. The data contains such information as the inertia characteristics of each body in the system, the connectivity between the bodies, and the forces acting on the bodies. The cab or the safety rollbar cage is modeled by the finite element method. Due to the considerable size and also the nonlinearity of the equations of motion, the computational efforts in solving these equations may become a major concern. For this reason, several stages of reduction techniques and simplifications of these equations were made in order to gain computational efficiency.