This Challenge gives you the opportunity to show your skills in the design of a lightweight, robust and eye-catching truck underrun protection system.

What is an underrun

About this Challenge

Performance requirements

Resources for this Challenge

Choosing winners

Underrun protection devices at the rear end of trucks help to increase traﬃc safety significantly. To enhance the safety of passengers during a car accident involving a passenger vehicle and a large truck, trucks are required by law to have an underrun protection system at their rear end. This device keeps colliding cars from running under the truck which would have disastrous consequences for passengers within the car. The underrun protection needs to be stiﬀ to ensure its performance during a crash while being as light as possible for fuel efficiency reasons. Last but not least, it should be aesthetic to make the truck look as cool as possible.The challenge is to come up with a new design for an underrun protection that is light, stiﬀ and aesthetic. Both law as well as the installation situation pose some speciﬁc design requirements that have to be met. All the design requirements are described in more detail in the text and drawing below.The structural performance of your design is critical. Therefore the performance of your design has to be validated using the SimScale engineering simulation platform. The SimScale platform runs in your browser, so that there is no installation necessary. The required analyses can be done using the Free plan that comes completely free of charge. The simulation details to set up your analysis as well as links to a video tutorial, a documented tutorial and an example project that you can import into your SimScale platform workspace are given below.- Example CAD project in STEP file which is used to explain the analysis and technical details of the Challenge in PDF can be downloaded from 'Download specification' button below.The main metrics for winning this Challenge are weight and stiﬀness. Besides that, the jury is looking for creative, aesthetic designs. The designers that make it to the ﬁnal round will be asked to share their simulation projects with the SimScale team after the Challenge has ended. The SimScale team will then check on the structural performance of your design and validate if the criteria are met.