Safety Analysis of the New Actros Megaspace Cabin According to ECE-R29/02

During the development of truck cabins the safety of the driver and the front seat passenger in an accident is considered. The cab must be designed in such a way that in an accident a sufficient survival space is guaranteed. The legal requirements of cabin safety are fixed in Europe in the regulation ECE-R29. In order to reduce the number of iteration loops during the development process, a computational simulation method for the load cases roof strength test, front impact test and rear wall strength test of the ECE-R29 was introduced. The explicit finite element program LS-DYNA was used for that purpose. The deformations of the driver‘s cab and the loads of the individual components within the elastic and plastic range of the material behaviour can be determined before the first tests are carried out. These tests can then be limited to a minimum by the numeric simulation. In this paper, the application of this numerical method by the example of the new of ACTROS Megaspace cab is presented and compared to the results from the acceptance test according to ECE-R29.