Another simple study today: crumple zones on cars. Quite an understated safety feature in my opinion, these vitally protect passengers during a crash by helping to avoid complete stops by the car. These zones, found on the front and rear of vehicles, are designed to buckle for low loads. They use a less rigid material than the steel shell surrounding the passengers so that buckling can easily occur across it. During a crash, buckling in the crumple zone absorbs energy and diverts it down the side of the car, away from those in danger. The Force is spread over time in this way, lessening deceleration to protect passengers. Similarly, in trains crumple zones are used extensively across every carriage, the front end uses a long crumple zone to reduce strain, causing more plastic deformation, and preventing fracture.
Photo taken from blog.johnath.com
Post by Tom Corbett
Design of crumple zones is an important but highly specialised sub-section of structural mechanics. It is unusual in that as designers we are normally concerned with objects working below their elastic limit - ie. after use, the material returns to its original geometry. With crumple zones much of the work involves understanding the plastic behavious of structures.
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