Over the past several years, the use of advanced safety belt and airbag systems in passenger cars had led to a reduction of severe head and chest injuries. Attention has therefore become more focused on lower limb injuries. These are not necessarily life threatening, but very often cause considerable pain and frequently require long-term treatment and rehabilitation and they can even result in permanent disability.

This paper presents an FE model of human lower extremities in PAM-CRASH™ code as part of a collaborative effort between Volkswagen AG, Wolfsburg, Germany and Engineering Systems International (ESI), Rungis, France.

The model includes the ankle/foot complex (ESI) and the tibia, fibula, patella, and femur as well as some of the knee ligaments (VW) with the approximate anatomical structure and a mass distribution of a 50th percentile male. It replaces the lower extremities of a 50th percentile HIII dummy and is connected with the pelvis of the dummy.

This model will be used in an effort to investigate injury mechanisms during a frontal impact. The FE dummy with the FE human legs is placed in a car model which has a simplified interior structure. The objective of this paper is to analyse the loadings and kinematics of the legs for different combinations of intrusion depth and intrusion velocity (of the foot rest, the pedals, the steering wheel and the dashboard).