6. Modeling, Experimental Verification and Optimization of Seat Structure Per ECE R14

Up to date concerns of automotive authorities are environmental sustainability, fuel efficiency and CO₂ emission. Lightweight component design is a key solution for those concerns. In a passenger vehicle, total weight of the seat structures is comparably high due to their quantity per vehicle. Therefore, seat structure has been chosen for lightweight design. Moreover, seat structure, seat belts and seat-belt anchorages are vital components of vehicles considering passenger safety in case of an accident. Thus, these components have to pass safety tests defined in European regulation ECE-R14. In order to reduce the number and cost of the regulation tests, a virtual test model is carried out using nonlinear finite element methods. Additionally, thickness and topology optimizations are performed to investigate light weighting opportunities on seat structure. Explicit and implicit methods are used to obtain virtual test model by using Radioss and ANSYS, respectively. The required validation process is carried out by performing seat pull test according to ECE R-14 regulations. Seat back displacement data is collected during the experiment. After comparison of the experiment result with both implicit and explicit analyses results, the proper virtual test model is chosen by taking computation time and accuracy into account. The validated model is used to optimize thickness and topology. The final design after optimization is evaluated in virtual test environment per ECE R14 regulation.