Paper Title
Design And Experimental Analysis Of An Impact Attenuator

Abstract
An impact attenuator is a device used to protect the vehicle from damage during a collision thereby preventing the occurrence of injury to the driver. Nowadays with the increasing number of accidents occurring during automotive races, driver safety has become one of the major research areas. Engineers are now designing and producing various advanced safety systems to ensure the safety of the driver. However, the development time and cost of any product in real time is high. This can be reduced to a great extent by certain computer simulated software's. The simulated results however can’t be used directly into real life without any validation with experimental results. The aim of this paper is to compare the computer simulated results of energy absorbing capabilities of Aluminium 6082 T6 foils for impact attenuator using ANSYS with that of the actual drop test values performed in the structural mechanics laboratory of IIT Madras. The analysis results are found in good agreement with experimental results obtained from crash testing in real time and this validates our design of the attenuator. Average deceleration of impact is less than 20 g as per the requirement of SUPRA SAE design rules.