Performance of Aluminium Alloy Side Door Subjected to Pole Impact Test

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.