Children aged around 10 years old (10 YO) are not as well protected as those below 6YO or adults in traffic accidents. To improve the protective means for occupant and pedestrian in this age group, it is imperative to enhance the research techniques. To overcome the limitations of testing post‐mortem human subject (PMHS) or crash dummy, a whole‐body pediatric finite element (FE) model (named CHARM‐10) with anatomic details and reasonable biofidelity was developed. The model development and validation at component/body part level have been reported elsewhere and are briefly summarized in this paper. In this study, the integration of three main body regions (head‐neck, thorax‐upper extremities and pelvis‐lower extremities) are described in detail. CHARM‐10 has two postures (standing and seated) to represent a pediatric pedestrian and seated occupant, respectively. The standing posture model was used to corroborate the kinematic responses in car‐to‐pedestrian impact by comparing kinematics with a newly scaled 10 YO multi‐body model. The seated posture model was validated against low‐speed volunteer sled tests and a high‐speed PMHS sled test data. In both pedestrian and occupant impact scenarios, reasonable agreements were obtained. The CHARM‐10 models were therefore preliminarily validated but require further improvement before applications in automotive safety research.
Keywords:
finite element method, occupant impact, pedestrian impact, pediatric human model, traffic injury