There’s no denying that cars are better than ever. Thanks to crash testing, automakers have an even better understanding of a vehicle’s structure. It’s not enough that a chassis is strong, it should also absorb enough energy so that the occupants won’t feel the brunt of the impact.
But if there’s one limitation, it’s that engineers can’t see what’s going on inside the chassis during an impact. Yes, there are loads of high-speed cameras to record the test, but seeing how all that metal twists and bend in real time is another matter.
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For Mercedes-Benz and the Fraunhofer-Institute for High-Speed Dynamics, its solution is to use an x-ray. Yes, just like the one used in hospitals. However, the one being used by the German automaker is no ordinary x-ray off the shelf. It uses a linear accelerator with 1 kHz technology as the radiation source for it to shoot 1,000 frames every second and see through layers of metal, aluminum, and plastic.
Radiation, you say? Well, X-rays need a lot of that to work, hence the warning signs near rooms. To prevent overdoses of that, Mercedes-Benz went through all the trouble of installing 400mm thick concrete wall around the crash test facility, the Ernst Mach Institute.
That’s on top of a 45-ton door so no radiation leaks out. Being German, it’s safe to say that all safety precautions and compliances were made to ensure its people don’t get exposed to radioactivity.
You’re probably wondering what a crash test through an x-ray looks like. To the untrained eye (ie, us), it looks like layers of metal getting mangled. For engineers, however, it’s all they need to see to study a vehicle’s crash dynamics. Now that they can see how the structure reacts to a crash from the inside, engineers will be able to come up with even better solutions to make cars stronger and safer.
