Collapse Strength and Crush Space Analysis in Lateral Side Pole Impact of an Electric Vehicle

High-Voltage Battery (HVB) protection in lateral pole impact is very important due to severe nature of the impact. Unlike frontal impacts, vehicles have limited range of space and capacity to absorb kinetic energy in lateral side impacts. Nowadays, computer-aided engineering (CAE) using finite element analysis (FEA) is utilized routinely to simulate high-speed crash events of varied type, including side pole impact. These CAE applications focus on the analysis and design of HVB when the vehicle structure is well-developed. CAE methods are time-consuming and are not suited during the pre-program stage when the structure is only in a concept stage and not even a reasonable CAD is available/developed in any sense to use these methods. There is no analytical tool available to understand how to define the characteristics of the structure that surrounds and protects the HVB. The primary motive of this publication is to help with this aspect of vehicle planning/development. Needless to state that this procedure can also be used in planning/developing of internal combustion engine (ICE) and hybrid vehicles, as well. The objective therefore is to develop a simple method/procedure that can give reasonably accurate estimation of the collapse/crush force required for a specified crush space and hence protect the critical components, such as HVB and fuel tank. This analytical method also gives some insight into the optimal use of the upper body (rocker and floor cross-members) and underbody (ladder frame) parts. It was found, for a problem under consideration, optimum kinetic energy to be absorbed by the upper body is 32.5% to avoid intrusion into HVB.