Front Impact Simulation of Urban Bus

A recurring accident that involves buses is the frontal impact against vehicles or obstacles; because of this, injuries and deaths take place in occupants and drivers. Most bus safety regulations are fundamentally concerned with rollover safety; therefore, frontal impact safety is relegated. Several works focus on cabin occupants of the bus like the international regulation ECE R 66, and in the absence of a specific standard for a frontal crash; it has been chosen to make a frontal simulation to evaluate the structure. The research is based on the nonlinear explicit dynamic simulation of a frontal impact of the frontal section of a bus using the finite element method to analyze the resistance of the structure configuration and verify that no component of the bus is exposed or has contact with the driver’s survival space. The geometry of the main body components was generated. The mechanical properties of the material and the boundary conditions, to recreate the event, were assigned the closest to reality. Then, it was established that the structure had not affected the driver’s survival space during the crash and that it is appropriate to perform models that can be evaluated under different test conditions.