Recently, small SUVs are the best seller in the automotive market. In general, small SUVs have the limited crushable zone that can absorb crash loads due to the small engine room and are vulnerable to passenger safety. In particular, unlike frontwheel...
Recently, small SUVs are the best seller in the automotive market. In general, small SUVs have the limited crushable zone that can absorb crash loads due to the small engine room and are vulnerable to passenger safety. In particular, unlike frontwheel drive, the all-wheel drive vehicle has a propeller shaft for strong power transmission in the longitudinal direction, so that a larger load is engaged to the passenger through the vehicle body and thus relatively weak to passenger injuries in the full-frontal crash. As a way to compensate for this, a swage is added on the propeller shaft to absorb the load at an appropriate timing to reduce the load delivered to the vehicle body. In this paper, we construct a model that reflects the specifications of commercially available all-wheel drive small SUVs, and derive the optimum swage by measuring the change of acceleration value according to the various position, length and shape of the swage in the USNCAP 56KPH Full Frontal Test.