Abstract
Head injuries are often fatal or of sufficient severity to pedestrians in vehicle crashes. Finite element (FE) simulation provides an effective approach to understand pedestrian head injury mechanisms in vehicle crashes. However, studies of pedestrian head safety considering full human body response and a broad range of impact scenarios are still scarce due to the long computing time of the current FE human body models in expensive simulations. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to develop and validate a computationally efficient FE pedestrian model for future studies of pedestrian head safety. Firstly, a FE pedestrian model with a relatively small number of elements (432,694 elements) was developed in the current study. This pedestrian model was then validated at both segment and full body levels against cadaver test data. The simulation results suggest that the responses of the knee, pelvis, thorax, and shoulder in the pedestrian model are generally within the boundaries of cadaver test corridors under lateral impact loading. The upper body (head, T1, and T8) trajectories show good agreements with the cadaver data in vehicle-to-pedestrian impact configuration. Overall, the FE pedestrian model developed in the current study could be useful as a valuable tool for a pedestrian head safety study.
Highlights
Pedestrian is the important part of vulnerable road users, and about 22% of the deaths in road traffic accidents in the world are pedestrians [1]
Multibody and finite element (FE) human body models are the main tools for predicting pedestrian head kinematics and injuries in vehicle-to-pedestrian collisions
The main purpose of the current study is to develop a computationally efficient full body FE model for pedestrian head kinematics and injury prediction
Summary
Pedestrian is the important part of vulnerable road users, and about 22% of the deaths in road traffic accidents in the world are pedestrians [1]. Accident data shows that 64% fatalities and 43% seriously injured pedestrians suffered from head injuries [2, 3]. Much effort has been made in the vehicle safety design for pedestrian protection, pedestrians still have a high injury risk when struck by current vehicles [4, 5]. Numerical simulations using human body models provide an effective approach to understand pedestrian head injury mechanisms in vehicle crashes, which is the foundation for pedestrian head protection. Multibody and finite element (FE) human body models are the main tools for predicting pedestrian head kinematics and injuries in vehicle-to-pedestrian collisions. The former was usually used in analyses of pedestrian head kinematics
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