AlON A-Pillars: Enhancing Passenger Safety and Driver Visibility

Shweta Rawat; Soumya Kanta Das

doi:10.4271/2014-01-0806

With the ever increasing emphasis on vehicle occupant safety, the safety of pedestrians is getting obscured behind the A-pillars that are expanding in order to meet the federal roof crush standards. The serious issue of pillar blind spots poses threats to the pedestrians who easily disappear from driver's field of view.

To recognize this blinding danger and design the car around the driver's eye, this paper proposes the implementation of Aluminum Oxynitride marked under name AlON by Surmet Corporation for fabrication of A-pillars that can allow more than 80% visibility through them.

AlON is a polycrystalline ceramic with cubic spinel crystal structure and is composed of aluminum, oxygen and nitrogen. With hardness more than 85% than sapphire, its applications range from aerospace to defense purposes which qualify it in terms of strength and thus imply that it can be conveniently used as A-pillars in vehicles. Furthermore, it possesses characteristics of being bonded to metals as well. Thus, AlON proves out to be an ideal material for applications requiring high -strength light-weight durability and transparency.

The modeling of ALON A-pillars is done in ANSYS 13 in accordance to the regulations for qualification for good roof strength rating.

The in-depth study of mechanical and optical properties of the material strongly favor the use of this material and emphasizes upon the fact that primary safety of avoiding the crash at the first place and secondary safety of minimizing the impact of the crash must go hand in hand.

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AlON A-Pillars: Enhancing Passenger Safety and Driver Visibility 2014-01-0806

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