Now, almost all car manufacturers have implemented crumple zone technology to increase the safety of a car. Accidents can happen to anyone and can happen anywhere. Hence, you have to be careful when driving and avoid unnecessary things when driving to prevent a bad accident. This feature helps the driver to drive in various conditions and, of course, increases safety and comfort. We hope now you are fully informed of the crumple zone technology.
Make sure you always drive carefully,ok! Crumple Zone at a Glance Crumple Zone is a new structural safety feature that has been widely applied in various types of cars.
Different Types of Car Engines. Other Articles. Press Release. Life Style. Cutting the deceleration in half also cuts the force in half. Therefore, changing the deceleration time from. Crumple zones accomplish this by creating a buffer zone around the perimeter of the car. Certain parts of a car are inherently rigid and resistant to deforming, such as the passenger compartment and the engine.
If those rigid parts hit something, they will decelerate very quickly, resulting in a lot of force. Surrounding those parts with crumple zones allows the less rigid materials to take the initial impact.
The car begins decelerating as soon as the crumple zone starts crumpling, extending the deceleration over a few extra tenths of a second. Crumple zones also help redistribute the force of impact. All of the force has to go somewhere -- the goal is to send it away from the occupants. Think of the force involved in a crash as a force budget. Everything that happens to the car during an impact and every person inside of the car at the time of the impact spends some of the force.
If the car hits a non-stationary object, like a parked car, then some force is transferred to that object. If the car hits something with a glancing blow and spins or rolls, much of the force is spent on the spinning and rolling.
If parts of the car fly off, even more force is spent. Most importantly, damage to the car itself spends force. Bending parts of the frame, smashing body panels, shattering glass -- all of these actions require energy.
Think of how much force is needed to bend the steel frame of a car. That amount of force is spent on bending the frame, so it is never transmitted to the occupants.
Crumple zones are based on that concept. Parts of the car are built with special structures inside them that are designed to be damaged, crumpled, crushed and broken. We'll explain the structures themselves shortly, but the fundamental idea is that it takes force to damage them.
Crumple zones spend as much force as possible so that other parts of the car as well as the occupants don't suffer the effects. So why not make the entire car one giant crumple zone? And if you need space for a crumple zone to absorb impact, how do you build a compact car with crumple zones?
We'll explain in the next section. His name appears on more than 2, patents. One of those patents, issued in , explains how a car could be designed with areas at the front and rear built to deform and absorb kinetic energy in an impact.
Absorbing and redirecting impact is great, but it isn't the only safety issue auto designers have to worry about. The passenger compartment of the car has to resist being penetrated by outside objects or other parts of the car, and it has to hold together so the occupants aren't thrown out.
You can't make an entire car a crumple zone because you don't want the people inside it to crumple also. That's why cars are designed with a rigid, strong frame enclosing the occupants, with crumple zones in the front and rear.
Force reduction and redistribution is accomplished inside the passenger compartment through the. There are some parts of cars that simply can't crumple. The engine is the main offender -- in most vehicles, the engine is a large, heavy block of steel. No crumpling there. The same holds true for vehicles with aluminum engine blocks.
Sometimes, cars have to be redesigned to move the engine farther back in the frame to accommodate a larger crumple zone. However, this can cause problems as well - if the engine is pushed back into the passenger compartment as a result of impact, it can cause injuries. They can be designed so that a section of frame protects the tank, but that part of the frame can bend away from the impact. For example, if a car is rear-ended, the frame bends up, lifting the gas tank out of the way and absorbing some impact.
Newer cars have systems that cut off fuel supply to the engine during a crash, and the Tesla Roadster , a high performance electric car, has a safety system that shuts off the battery packs and drains all electrical energy from the cables running throughout the car when it senses an emergency [source: Tesla Motors ].
Of course, it's easy to build crumple zones into a large vehicle with plenty of room to crumple before the passenger compartment is impacted. Designing crumple zones into small vehicles takes some creativity. A good example is the smart fortwo , an extremely small. The driver and passenger are enclosed in the tridion safety cell, a steel framework with excellent rigidity for its size.
The geometry is designed to distribute impacts across the entire frame. At the front and rear of the smart fortwo are what smart calls crash boxes. These are small steel frameworks that collapse and crumple to absorb impacts. Because the crash boxes are so small, other impact-absorbing features have been used to supplement them. For example, the transmission can act as a shock absorber in the event of a front-end collision. The short wheelbase of the fortwo means almost any impact will involve the tires , wheels and suspension.
These components have been designed to deform, break away or rebound, helping absorb even more kinetic energy during an impact [source: smart USA ]. We've talked about the incredible kinetic force at work when a car crashes, but imagine the force involved when two trains collide. Because of the immense weight of a train, a collision can create forces dozens or even hundreds of times greater than those in a car crash. Yet crumple zones can be used even under these extreme circumstances.
The front of the vehicle effectively acts as a cushion that slows the time it takes for the vehicle to come to a complete stop, applying less force on passengers, which could help save their lives. But in actuality, such construction proved deadly to passengers, because the force from impact went straight inside the vehicle and onto the passenger. The fully electric BMW i3 makes novel use of carbon fiber-reinforced plastics in its body. Roadmap for Future Mobility.
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