Vehicle-pedestrian collision experiments with the use of a moving dummy

Kühnel, Arne

Affiliations

¹Institute of Automotive Engineering, Berlin Technical University, Berlin, Germany

Abstract

All vehicle-pedestrian collision experiments carried out until now were using a dummy in walking or standing posture and the test-dummy was stationary in the instant of impact. These investigations do not provide necessary and sufficient information to reconstruct the realworld pedestrian accidents, particularly aspects of injury mechanism. Uncertainities in the prediction of real-world accidents are mainly caused due to the rotation of the pedestrian about the vertical axis and the point of impact on the vehicle. Case studies of real accidents show certain influence of pedestrian movement on dynamic behaviour of the collision. Therefore, to realize the conditions of real-world accidents a special test set up has been developed to simulate an impact of a moving dummy crossing the road and a moving vehicle.

From these investigations it could be concluded that a car "friendly to pedestrian" should have the following dynamic impact properties:

the maximum throw height of human body should be low
minimum head velocity onto the bonnet
the contact time between the pedestrian and the vehicle should be maximum.

Including the pedestrian movement additional possibilities of accident reconstruction offer: determination of impact speed and impact point by maximum displacement of pedestrian and also from distance of head dent on the bonnet to front bumper; determination of walking direction (left or right) from configuration of head dent and pelvis dent.

In addition, these investigations enable predictions of the relationship between injuries and environments.

Cited Works (1)

Year	Entry
1965	Severy DM. Auto-pedestrian impact experiments. In: Severy DM, ed. Proceedings of the 7th Stapp Car Crash and Field Demonstration Conference. 1963; University of California at Los Angeles. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas; 1965:345-373.

Cited By (6)

Year	Entry
1978	Appel H, Kuehnel A, Stuertz G, Gloeckner H. Pedestrian safety vehicle: design elements results of in-depth accident analyses and simulation. In: 22nd Annual Proceedings, Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine (AAAM). July 10-14, 1978; Ann Arbor, MI.132-153.
1975	Ashton SJ. The cause and nature of head injuries sustained by pedestrians. In: Proceedings of the 1975 International IRCOBI Conference on the Biomechanics of Impact. September 9-11, 1975; Birmingham, UK.101-113.
1975	Kühnel A, Wanderer U, Otte D. Ein Vergleich von realen mit nachgefahrenen Fußgängerunfällen. In: Proceedings of the 1975 International IRCOBI Conference on the Biomechanics of Impact. September 9-11, 1975; Birmingham, UK.269-278.
1976	Ashton SJ, Pedder JB, Mackay GM. A review of riders and pedestrians in traffic collisions. In: Proceedings of the 1976 International IRCOBI Conference on the Biomechanics of Impact. September 7-8, 1976; Amsterdam, The Netherlands.129-171.
1977	Stcherbatcheff G, Boulaire JP, Tarriere C, Fayon A, Got C, Patel A. Severity of head-to-car and head-to-ground impacts of pedestrians. In: Proceedings of the 1977 International IRCOBI Conference on the Biomechanics of Impact. September 7-9, 1977; Berlin, Germany.93-104.
2002	Bhalla K, Montazemi P, Crandall J, Yang J, Liu X, Dokko Y, Takahashi Y, Kikuchi Y, Longhitano D. Vehicle impact velocity prediction from pedestrian throw distance: trade-offs between throw formulae, crash simulators, and detailed multi-body modeling. In: Proceedings of the 2002 International IRCOBI Conference on the Biomechanics of Impact. September 18-20, 2002; Munich, Germany.