Refine
Year of publication
- 2013 (4) (remove)
Document Type
- Conference Proceeding (4) (remove)
Keywords
- Anthropometric dummy (4) (remove)
Institute
- Abteilung Fahrzeugtechnik (3)
- Sonstige (2)
A biofidelic flexible pedestrian legform impactor (FlexPLI) has been developed from the year 2000 onwards and evaluated by a technical evaluation group (Flex-TEG) of UN-ECE GRSP. A recently established UN-ECE GRSP Informal Group on GTR9 Phase 2 is aiming at introducing the FlexPLI within world-wide regulations on pedestrian safety (Phase 2 of GTR No. 9 as well as the new UN regulation 127 on pedestrian safety) as a test tool for the assessment of lower extremity injuries in lateral vehicle-to-pedestrian accidents. Besides, the FlexPLI has already been introduced within JNCAP and is on the Euro NCAP roadmap for 2014. Despite of the biofidelic properties in the knee and tibia sections, several open issues related to the FlexPLI, like the estimation of the cost benefit, the feasibility of vehicle compliance with the threshold values, the robustness of the impactor and of the test results, the comparability between prototype and production level and the finalization of certification corridors still needed to be solved. Furthermore, discussions with stakeholders about a harmonized lower legform to bumper test area are still going on. This paper describes several studies carried out by the Federal Highway Research Institute (BASt) regarding the benefit due to the introduction of the FlexPLI within legislation for type approval, the robustness of test results, the establishment of new assembly certification corridors and a proposal for a harmonized legform to bumper test area. Furthermore, a report on vehicle tests that previously had been carried out with three prototype legforms and were now being repeated using legforms with serial production status, is given. Finally, the paper gives a status report on the ongoing simulation and testing activities with respect to the development and evaluation of an improved test procedure with upper body mass for assessing pedestrian femur injuries.
Thoracic injuries are one of the main causes of fatally and severely injured casualties in car crashes. Advances in restraint system technology and airbags may be needed to address this problem; however, the crash test dummies available today for studying these injuries have limitations that prevent them from being able to demonstrate the benefits of such innovations. THORAX-FP7 was a collaborative medium scale project under the European Seventh Framework. It focused on the mitigation and prevention of thoracic injuries through an improved understanding of the thoracic injury mechanisms and the implementation of this understanding in an updated design for the thorax-shoulder complex of the THOR dummy. The updated dummy should enable the design and evaluation of advanced restraint systems for a wide variety (gender, age and size) of car occupants. The hardware development involved five steps: 1) Identification of the dominant thoracic injury types from field data, 2) Specification of biomechanical requirements, 3) Identification of injury parameters and necessary instrumentation, 4) Dummy hardware development and 5) Evaluation of the demonstrator dummy. The activities resulted in the definition of new biofidelity and instrumentation requirements for an updated thorax-shoulder complex. Prototype versions were realised and implemented in three THOR dummies for biomechanical evaluation testing. This paper documents the hardware developments and biomechanical evaluation testing carried out.
It is well known that most accidents with pedestrians are caused by the driver not being alert or misinterpreting the situation. For that reason advanced forward looking safety systems have a high potential to improve safety for this group of vulnerable road users. Active pedestrian protection systems combine reduction of impact speed by driver warning and/or autonomous braking with deployment of protective devices shortly before the imminent impact. According to the Euro NCAP roadmap the Autonomous Emergency Braking system tests for Pedestrians Protection will be set in force from 2016 onwards. Various projects and organisations in Europe are developing performance tests and assessment procedures as accompanying measures to the Euro NCAP initiative. To provide synthesised input to Euro NCAP so-called Harmonisation Platforms (HP-) have been established. Their main goal is to foster exchange of information on key subjects, thereby generating a clear overview of similarities and differences on the approaches chosen and, on that basis, recommend on future test procedures. In this paper activities of the Harmonisation Platform 2 on the development of Test Equipment are presented. For the testing targets that mimic humans different sensing technologies are required. A first set of specifications for pedestrian targets and the propulsion systems as collected by Harmonisation Platform 2 are presented together with a first evaluation for a number of available tools.
Real world accident reconstruction with the Total Human Model for Safety (THUMS) in Pam-Crash
(2013)
Further improvement of vehicle safety needs detailed analysis of real world accidents. According to GIDAS (German In-Depth Accident Study) most car to car front accidents occur at mid-crash severity. In this range thoracic injuries already occur. In this study a real world frontal crash with mid-crash severity out of the AARU database was reconstructed. The selected car to car accident was reconstructed by AARU by means of pc-crash software in order to get the initial dynamic accident conditions. These initial conditions were used to reconstruct the complete accident in more detail using FE models for the car structure and the occupants. Occupant simulations were performed with FE HIII-dummy models and the THUMS using Pam-Crash code. An initial THUMS validation was performed in order to verify the model-´s biofidelity by means of table-top test simulations. THUMS bone stiffness values were modified to match the real word occupant age. A comparison between driver and passenger restraint system loading was done, as well as an injury prediction comparison between the HIII-dummy model and THUMS response for both cases. Detailed comparison between the HIII-dummy models and THUMS regarding thoracic loading are discussed.