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Daimler Will Employ X-Ray Technology To Improve Passive Safety

Daimler, the parent company of Mercedes-Benz and smart, has announced a new partnership that will lead to enhanced safety in the event of a crash.
Daimler AG is trialling the application of x‑r ay technology in crash tests for the first time 1 photo
Photo: Mercedes-Benz
The latest collaboration of the German conglomerate is with the Fraunhofer Institute for High-Speed Dynamics, along with the Ernst-Mach-Institut and EMI from Freiburg.

These organizations will work with the Vehicle Safety department at Daimler AG, which will trial X-ray tests during crashworthiness evaluations.

The plan is to take X-rays of a vehicle as it crashes into an obstacle at a predefined velocity. Thanks to ultra-fast X-ray systems, the engineering team will be able to see how safety-relevant components behave in the event of an accident. The engineers will have razor-sharp quality images that will be used to improve computer-based simulations.

Eventually, the company will be able to test improvements with computer-aided design to obtain results that are just as precise as an actual impact test.

With the knowledge gathered from X-ray images of cars that are being crashed, Mercedes-Benz and smart will have safer vehicles in real-life accidents. Daimler has no plan of ditching real impact tests in the development process of its cars, but it will get to test more options and ideas before building a prototype.

Computer-aided design has been employed in the automotive industry since the 1980s, and simulations of impacts have been utilized in this business since the 1990s.

However, automakers still crash their cars in isolated compounds to test how they behave in the event of an impact.

Daimler is one of the pioneers of automotive safety, competing with Volvo on innovations. The three-pointed-star is one of the first brands to employ crumple zones in its production cars, which refer to components that are meant to absorb the energy of an impact to protect the occupants.

The premium brand from Germany began focusing on building cars that will offer enhanced protection to their passengers in the 1950s, and it never stopped this process.
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About the author: Sebastian Toma
Sebastian Toma profile photo

Sebastian's love for cars began at a young age. Little did he know that a career would emerge from this passion (and that it would not, sadly, involve being a professional racecar driver). In over fourteen years, he got behind the wheel of several hundred vehicles and in the offices of the most important car publications in his homeland.
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