Cellbond. - Side Impact Barriers

Side impact crash testing was pioneered in the United States, with a federal standard finalised by the National Highways Traffic Safety Agency (NHTSA) in the 1980's. This prescribes a test with a deformable barrier face mounted onto a striking cart, impacting the side of a vehicle at an angle (crabbed). The FMVSS 214 standard is still in force today, whilst there are calls to upgrade it to reflect a changed car fleet with larger and heavier vehicles. Notable are the efforts of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) who developed a taller, profiled deformable barrier. Cellbond was instrumental in the development of this deformable element. IIHS regularly carries out test series and publishes vehicle evaluation results to assist consumers in choosing safe cars.

A European regulation to assess side impact crashworthiness of vehicles came into force in 1996. This test is carried out perpendicular to the vehicle, again using a deformable honeycomb element mounted onto a moving trolley. Early European deformable barriers were made of foam or used triangular shaped honeycomb designs (for example the UTAC barrier). These were replaced by solid, multilayer honeycomb barriers such as the Multi-2000 developed by Cellbond which showed improved stability and repeatability.

Taking a step further, Cellbond used the same manufacturing process to develop the Advanced-2000 barrier which allowed to move from multilayer to a single element with changing crush characteristics. Between 1999 and 2001, EEVC WG13 investigated the repeatability of various European barrier designs, and published recommendations which narrow down the specification to an Advanced-type design. Besides EuroNCAP, vehicle safety laws in Japan, Australia, Korea and China have adopted very similar test procedures.

Again, it has become clear that cars on the road are much heavier as well as stiffer than accidentology studies, on which the original European test procedure was based, allowed for. Originating as an International Harmonisation of Research Activities (IHRA) effort, in 2002 EEVC WG13 started to look at upgrading the European side impact procedure, with Aprosys taking over in 2004. Part of this is the development of a test procedure using an Advanced European Side Impact Barrier (AE-MDB) which is a more severe impact due to increased mass and a profiled barrier shape. Cellbond has been involved in the barrier development from the start and continues to support EEVC and Aprosys in their ongoing work.