This paper presents the performance of Aluminium Alloy side door subjected to side pole impact test. Aluminium Alloy is used in order to reduce the overall car weight. Therefore further improvements of the Aluminium Alloy side door system were carried out to obtain similar crash performance with the conventional steel side door system. The main crash performance properties are the internal energy, bending displacement, and mass. These properties were used to simulate the pole impact test using LS-DYNA Finite Element software. The improvements techniques used involved parameters such as thickness variation of the parts, ribs addition, beam shape variations, and combination of the factors. From the tests, three designs which include combination of parameters have met the target requirements. Thus, the use of Aluminium Alloy in side door system is acceptable provided there are improvements regarding the crash performance.

The parametric study of automotive composite bumper beam subjected to frontal impact is presented and discussed in this paper. The aim of this study is to analyze the effect of steel and composite material on energy absorption of automotive front bumper beam. The front bumper beams made of e-glass/epoxy composite and carbon epoxy composite are studied and characterized by impact modeling using LS-DYNA V971, according to United States New Car Assessment Program (US-NCAP) frontal impact velocity and based on European Enhanced Vehicle-safety Committee. The most important variable of this structure are- mass, material, and Specific Energy Absorption (SEA). The results are compared with bumper beam made of mild steel. Three types of materials are used in the present study which consists of mild steel as references material, Aluminum AA5182, E-glass/epoxy composite and carbon fiber/epoxy composite with three different fiber configurations. The beams were subjected to impact loading to determine the internal energy and SEA and to reduce mass of the conventional bumper beam. The in-plane failure behaviors of the composites were evaluated by using Tsai Wu failure criterion. The results for the composite materials are compared to that of the reference material to find the best material with highest SEA. LS-DYNA Finite Element Analysis software was used. The results showed that carbon fiber/epoxy composite bumper can reduce the bumper mass and has highest value of SEA followed by glass fiber/epoxy composite.

In this study, a computer program for calculating fatigue life of component is developed and introduced in LS-PrePost software. The program is written in Fortran programming language and the fatigue life equations used is taken from well-published literature. The materials covered are steel and aluminum. The developed program is able to read stress, strain and element values from d3plot and the keyword file. Having extracted the output from d3plot and keyword file, the fatigue life is then calculated and presented into a separate file called FATIGUE. The integration of output from FATIGUE will is displayed in LS-PrePost. Finally, the results of fatigue life contour are successfully displayed through LS-PrePost.

The leg injury criteria subjected to frontal impact is presented and discussed. The aim is to analyze the effect of steel material of bumper shell on pedestrian leg injury criteria of front bumper system. The front bumper beam is made of mild steel and characterized by impact modeling using LS-DYNA V971, according to United States New Car Assessment Program (US-NCAP) frontal impact velocity and based on European Enhanced Vehicle-safety Committee. The most important variable of this structure are mass, material, internal energy, and Leg Injury Criterion (LIC). In order to evaluate the protective performance of the baseline hood, the Finite Element Models (FEM) of legform of an adult pedestrian is used. The result shows that the acceleration of 91.5 g, shear displacement of 4.2 mm and bending angle of 12.0˚ graphs are performing below the danger limit. The reason found to be there were no contact between the front bumper beam and the legform, so that the injury is less. This is shows that the clearance between the bumper shell and front bumper beam are sufficient.

Detecting road lane is one of the key processes in vision-based driving assistance system and autonomous vehicle system. The main purpose of the lane detection process is to estimate car position relative to the lane so that it can provide a warning to the driver if the car starts departing the lane. This process is useful not only to enhance safe driving but also in self-driving car system. A novel approach to lane detection method using image processing techniques is presented in this research. The method minimizes the complexity of computation by the use of prior knowledge of color, intensity and the shape of the lane marks. By using prior knowledge, the detection process requires only two different analyses which are pixel intensity analysis and color component analysis. The method starts with searching a strong pair of edges along the horizontal line of road image. Once the strong edge is detected the process continues with color analysis on pixels that lie between the edges to check whether the pixels belong to a lane or not. The process is repeated for different positions of horizontal lines covering the road image. The method was successfully tested on selected 20 road images collected from internet.