Conceptual Design of New Bio-inspired Automotive Side-Door Impact Beam

Side-door impact beam has been introduced to the passenger vehicles to reduce the door intrusion into passenger compartment during side impact collision. This study aims to develop the new bio-inspired design concepts of composites side-door impact beam. The integrated Theory of Inventive Principle – Function Oriented Search (TRIZ-FOS) and Biomimetics method is the idea generation technique applied in this research to develop the design concepts while the analysis of the generated design concepts using impact test simulation in finite element analysis (FEA) is the method to compare their performances. TRIZ (FOS) – Biomimetics method helps to transfer the nature technology into engineering problems and shows that it can generates five design concepts based on three nature technology which is toucan beak, pomelo peel and hedgehog spine in this study. The FEA analysis method then compared their strength, deformation, energy absorption and weight. In a conclusion, the integrated method of TRIZ (FOS) – Biomimetics helps engineers in generating the nature technology ideas to solve engineering problems using a structured method as proposed in this study while the FEA method really helps engineers to obtain the performances data for the design generated before proceed to the next step of product development process..