Analysis head injuries of Vietnamese motorcyclist without a helmet in car to motorbike frontal impact using a computer model

Abstract

Nowadays, with the increasing demand for travel, the number of people using motorbikes is increasing, especially in Vietnam. People tend to face more injury risks when they are in traffic, such as vulnerable road users (VRU) – pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists. Therefore, the objective of this study is to assess how car crashes influence Vietnamese motorcyclists' bodies, in particular their heads, because they are the most vulnerable parts of their bodies. The result of this study is to let people know what they’re facing in case they are hit by a car. In addition, this research analyzes the injury to the motorcyclist's head when being hit by different configurations of the car. Due to the lack of facilities, car-to-motorcyclist frontal impact simulation has become the best way to resolve this problem. The impact conditions, which were obtained from real motorcyclist accidents in Vietnam, including the speed of vehicle and motorcycle, and impact angle, were defined as initial loading conditions in a simulation of the head striking the windscreen by using a finite element Vietnamese dummy model. Logistic regression models were developed to study brain injury risk with respect to injury-related variables: the head linear acceleration and head injury criterion (HIC) value. In this paper, the deformation of the motorbike structure model was neglected, so the material has been selected as a rigid form. The knowledge from this research could be a prerequisite for developing guidelines to improve motorcyclist safety in Vietnam.