Abstract: In the safety performance development concerning vehicle's small overlap frontal crash, wheels are the main load-bearing components, and the failure of wheel hinges will affect the force and deformation mode of the wheel, hence, accurately predicting the failure is an important difficult point in the early development of crash safety performance. Accordingly, a tensile test is proposed in this paper to obtain the failure force of hinge connecting wheel and chassis for accurately finding the solution of hinge failure. Firstly, a public simulation model is used to investigate the effects of wheel falloff from the vehicle on the result of crash. By combining simulation with numerical calculation, the correlation between the peak force in each direction of wheel hinge and the collision energy is analyzed to determine the measurement range of hinge failure force. Then a tensile test device is designed for a vehicle model adopting the same type of front suspension as the public model, with tests conducted and the failure forces of wheel hinges are obtained and then applied to the forward development of that production vehicle. The results show that the accurate simulation model with consideration of the failure force of wheel hinge can greatly enhance the simulation accuracy of small overlap frontal crash, thereby ensuring the forward safety performance development of the vehicle.

Key words: small overlap frontal crash, wheel hinges, hinge failure force, tensile test, simulation accuracy