Seat and especially head restraint design have a significant influence on risk for whiplash injury in low speed rear impact. For seat optimization, especially during early product development, a proper simulation of dummy behavior using finite element analysis (FEA) is important. For development and evaluation of the FEA methodology, several seats were equipped with occupant activated (re-)active head restraint riACTTM, and tests were performed on a HyGe acceleration sled using both the IIWPG 16 km/h triangular pulse and IIWPG test protocol. A correlation between BioRID II dummy behavior in sled test, and LS-DYNA coupled Madymo BioRID II facet dummy behavior is demonstrated. After FEA correlation results interpretation, a study of active head restraint robustness is illustrated.
Keywords:
rear impact; head restraints; whiplash; neck; shear; finite element analysis