Active pedestrian head protection against windscreen

Tinard, Violaine; Bourdet, Nicolas; Deck, Caroline; Willinger, Rémy

Affiliations

¹ULP-CNRS-7507, Biomechanical Systems Transport and Safety, Institut de Mécanique des Fluides et des Solides, 2 rue Boussingault, 67000 STRASBOURG (FRANCE)

Abstract

In road traffic accidents involving pedestrians or cyclists against cars, head injuries are one of the most common injury types and the main cause of fatalities. Recent in deep accident analysis demonstrates that the windscreen, pillars and bonnet are very often involved in case of severe pedestrian head injury. The present study proposes an active protection system for pedestrian or cyclist head impact against the windscreen (and in particular against the pillar) and bonnet area. In case of an automotive impact with a pedestrian, contact or non contact transducers record the impact and transfer the information to actuators which open the bonnet and eject a dampened flexible protective panel which covers the windscreen and pillars. This active protection system prevents the pedestrian’s head to come into direct contact with the hard windscreen or pillar and provides a dampened surface on which the head hits, decreasing the risk of head trauma. The panel can eventually be released a few hundreds of milliseconds after head impact in order to provide visibility to the car driver. A second panel is added under the bonnet in order to decrease the risk of head injuries when the pedestrian head impacts the bonnet.

The present proposal suggests illustrating the efficiency of the proposed active and passive protection systems based on the simulation of the pedestrian kinematics and the numerical analysis of the head-protective system interaction at the time of impact. In a first step, the multibody simulation of the pedestrian kinematics showed that an activation of the protective panel within 100 ms and remaining until 250 ms after the impact is appropriate to avoid any direct head contact with the windscreen or the pillar. The multi layered flexible protective panel has then been optimised in terms of layer thickness, elastic-plastic and failure properties against both, HIC value and new biomechanical head injury criteria for adults. Simulations have also been done to evaluate the bonnet system in terms of HIC and biomechanical criteria.

Links

URL: http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/esv/esv20/07-0449-W.pdf

Cited Works (7)

Year	Entry
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Cited By (1)

Year	Entry
2010	Helmer T, Ebner A, Samaha RR, Scullion P, Kates R. Injury risk to specific body regions of pedestrians in frontal vehicle crashes modeled by empirical, in-depth accident data. Stapp Car Crash J. 2010;54:93-117. SAE 2010-22-0006.