Efficient Characteristic Identification of Plastic Materials for Crash Analysis with 3-Point Bending Machine

According to WHO’s report, there are over 270,000 people who are involved in traffic fatal accidents [1]. Based on this accident data, the third-party assessment organization performs pedestrian protection test to evaluate a vehicle safety performance [2]. The pedestrian protection tests are evaluated for the protective performance of a head and legs of pedestrian. In particular, plastic parts such as a bumper face, a grille and head lights are evaluated by the leg pedestrian test. On the other hand, low speed crash test regulated by the United Nations evaluates a bumper protection performance (ECE42). In general, the pedestrian and bumper protection performances are in a trade-off relationship. Therefore, it has become important to balance these performances because the country which does the pedestrian protection test is increasing in recent years. In order to design these performances, it is essential to use the plastic CAE model with high accuracy. However, there are many types of characteristics for the plastic parts compared to the steel parts. It is an issue to collect the material properties for the many plastic parts in author’s development environment. Investigating the past literature to solve this issue, we found that Reithofer et al.[3] developed the machine and method to create the material property for CAE in a short time. So this study is to validate that the machine can be used efficiently to identify the material property for the pedestrian protection and low speed crash.