When it comes to sustainability, every small action helps. Manufacturers often destroy entire vehicles as part of their crash-test program. German firm Messring offers an alternative by proposing the use of a deceleration sled only on the chassis.
The small overlap crash test is one of the significant challenges for the structural strength of vehicles. One of the primary assessment criteria is the intrusion of tires, body and chassis parts into the passenger cabin. With the M=SLED Small Overlap, there is now an option to cost-effectively test critical chassis components that could penetrate the passenger compartment without destroying an entire car body.
The ability to examine the crash behaviour of the chassis individually can provide vital information for further research and development early in the development process and prevent expensive misdevelopments.
Measuring chassis behaviour in the wheel housing
The test sled has been designed for use with the MESSRING HydroBrake and designed to simulate the small overlap test scenario on the left side of the vehicle realistically. The chassis being tested runs freely rolling on the ground up to 64 km/h against a load cell wall held in the small overlap barrier's contour and is then decelerated in a controlled process up to the breaking point. Thanks to the additional load cell wall, which is modelled in the shape of a wheel housing and runs on the sled, the resulting forces and deflection of the components in the wheel housing are measured efficiently.
“These measurement results in combination with the high-speed recordings of the crash documentation provide valuable information on how a chassis behaves in a small overlap test,” says Wolfgang Rohleder, Sales Manager, MESSRING GmbH and continues “When and in which order the individual components of the chassis break under critical load has a great influence on the direction of the deflection and thus on the potential for intrusion into the passenger compartment.
With the M=SLED Small Overlap we can help vehicle developers to make cars safer and protect road users”.
Construction-wise, the sled can be adapted to different chassis mounts. Furthermore, thanks to the precise and reproducible braking pulses of the HydroBrake, different vehicle loads can be simulated and testing of various vehicle classes and vehicles is possible.
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