Abstract
During a car frontal collision, some part of the occupant's kinetic energy is transferred to the vehicle's kinetic energy through the restraint system. The high ratio of the transferred energy has an advantage for an occupant protection. This phenomenon is called "ride down effect". It is experimentally known that if the automotive body deceleration is large in the early stages of a collision, the effect becomes large, under the condition that a vehicle kinetic energy and a maximum value of automotive body deformation are same. In order to design an automotive body structure in view of the ride down effect, the dynamics relation with the occupant deceleration, which was one of important performance indexes, must be revealed. However, there have been few researches to analyze theoretically the mechanism of ridedown effect in detail. In this paper, using two degrees of freedom model of a vehicle and an occupant, we formulated ridedown effect focusing attention on the protection devices. The relationship between the ratio of the ride down effect and the occupant deceleration caused by crashing the automotive body structure was analyzed theoretically, and an optimum automotive crash property was examined.
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