Chapter 10 - Robust concept exploration of driver’s side vehicular impacts for human-centric crashworthiness

Abstract

One major objective of governments across the world is the minimization of human deaths and serious injury risks while using road transport systems. This necessitates a need to quantify and manage the injury risks on the human body in terms of the different vehicular impact variables and their associated uncertainties for different crash scenarios. In this chapter, we present a decision-based robust design framework to quantify and manage the head impact-based injury risks on occupants for different model-based car crash scenarios. The key functionality offered is the designer’s capability to carry out robust design studies with a focus on managing the selected impact variables and associated uncertainties such that brain injury risks are controlled within acceptable levels. The efficacy of the framework is tested for driver’s side impact scenarios with impact velocity and angle of impact as the critical variables of interest. Two head injury criteria, namely, head injury criterion and neck injury criterion are selected to quantitatively measure the head and neck injury risks in crash simulations. Using the framework, a robust design problem is formulated to explore the combination of impact variables that best satisfice the injury goals defined. The framework and associated design constructs are generic and support the formulation and decision-based robust design of vehicle impact scenarios for managing injury risks.