The present work focuses the attention on the sensitivity study of the equivalent mechanism (EM) conceptual modelling technique for vehicle body crashworthiness analyses. A library implementation of EM was presented by the authors in a previous work. This paper presents an extension by treating a more complex application case: a planar beam assembly that follows the approximate topology of the front side part of a vehicle. The analysis case consists of an impact against a rigid wall. A sensitivity analysis is performed w.r.t. variations in the geometry, using detailed FE simulations as a reference to validate the procedure in terms of accuracy. The sensitivity analysis covers two slight modifications in the geometry of two joints. The results show that the deformation modes of the EM model vary in agreement with the modes predicted through detailed FE simulations and that an acceptable correlation between the two simulation models is achieved in terms of rigid wall displacement and deceleration curves.

@InProceedings\{CSGMFDM14,
  author       = "Candreva, Stefano and Straface, Domenico and Garre, Carlos and Mundo, Domenico and Farkas, Laszlo and Donders, Stijn and Mas, Peter",
  title        = "Sensitivity Analysis on the Equivalent Mechanisms Model for Conceptual Design of Vehicle Body Crashworthiness",
  booktitle    = "Proceedings of ISMA International Conference on Noise and Vibration Engineering",
  year         = "2014",
  url          = "http://gmrv.es/Publications/2014/CSGMFDM14"
}