Muskan Taneja, a third-year Mechanical Engineering student at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) Pilani University, KK Birla Goa Campus, has diligently focussed on developing a solution to minimise im pact on a vehicle and the passenger in case of a car crash. This eye-catching innovation has been widely appreciated within the automotive industry, and helped her win the Indian Automotive Technology and Innovation Awards (IATIA) 2018 ‘Student Innovator of the Year’ award.
INTRODUCTION
Given the contemporary fast-paced life and its dependency on transportation, it is imperative to focus on accidents and their impact. According to various available statistics, around 1.3 mn people globally die in road crashes every year, which amount to 3,287 deaths on an average a day. Further, an additional 20-50 mn either sustain injures or are disabled. India, unfortunately, is the largest contributor to worldwide accidents and fatalities – 1.5 lakh people die in road accidents in over five lakh road accidents every year.
On the vehicle side, despite various research and innovations carried out for crash boxes (a major component of the frontal impact zone in a car), none have been implemented over a decade due to the cost-effectiveness of the existing model.
To tackle this problem, Muskan along with various professors from both Pilani and Goa, worked on developing a more efficient design with minimum cost and volume requirements. The prototype proposed helps increase the efficiency of the crash box by 29 % along with reduction in space required for the component by as much as 40 %, while keeping the weight constant.
The innovation started with a base thought of increasing the packing fraction of the crash box to reduce the space occupied, and to further utilise this space to better design and performance characteristics of a car. The students worked on introducing circular tubes inside the hollow space of the crash box to facilitate distribution of force in all directions and avoid straight wave propagation in case of modern-day crush cans. These students further used the super fold element theory to introduce corrugations along with filling in cylinders in the crush can.
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