Car safety

Engineers at the University of Hertfordshire have found a way to comply with car safety regulations almost 10 times faster than traditional methods.

About 9,000 pedestrian and cyclists die every year on roads in the EU, and 200,000 are seriously injured. As a result of these statistics new European legislation (EuroNCAP) for pedestrian safety has been introduced and has set considerable challenges for car manufacturers in the design of cars, especially bonnets and bumpers.

Dr William Tiu from the University’s School of Aerospace, Automotive & Design Engineering has developed software that will allow car manufacturers to meet pedestrian impact requirements in approximately 20 minutes as opposed to the normal time of close to three hours.

The software, PEDMARKER, which has been sold to Nissan, UK and Japan, and is according to Dr Tiu the first of its kind, allows car manufacturers to mark out a grid area at the front of the car so that maximum pedestrian safety features can be incorporated into the design while the car is being modelled and so that it complies with EuroNCAP and the Japanese NCAP requirements.