DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION OF EEVC WG17 LOWER LEGFORM FE MODEL FOR PEDESTRIAN SAFETY

Abstract

Vehicle-pedestrian collisions had claimed the lives of many in the world roads yearly. Among the types of injury that may occur in a vehicle-pedestrian collision, lower extremity injur ies have the highest account. These alarming statis tic has encouraged joining effort from researchers, car manufacturers and the governm ent to find solutions in reducing the risk of vulne rable road users. The car bumper structure design plays a crucial role in cus hioning the impact on the pedestrian leg during a cThe European Enhanced Vehicle-Safety Committee (EEVC) has develo ped test methods to evaluate severity of the lower leg injury, upper leg injury and head impact injury in a vehicle-pedestrian simu lated collision. Since lower extremity injury are m ost common, undivided attention should be paid on the lower legform to bumper test. The maximum bending angle, maximum shearing displa cement and maximum tibia acceleration are among the three injury crite rion determined for lower legform to bumper test. B efore the lower legform to bumper test can be perform the lower legform has to be certified statically and dynamically. The advancement of computerization had supported th e usage of Finite Element Method(FEM) in simulating real life scenarios for analysis. Irregular geometries are now discretized and solved numerically. Finite Element Analysis(FEA ) has proven to reduce time and cost significantly therefore the author took ad vantaged of this tool and simulated a lower legform to bumper collision. This paper presents in detail the static and dynamic certifica tion of the Finite Element (FE) legform model using the HyperWorks software. The static results for both bending and shearing has to be within the EEVC/WG17 limits and the internal en ergy at 15o shall be 100±7J. The maximum bending angle shall not be less than 6. 2o and not more than 8.2o, the maximum shearing dis placement shall not be less than 3.5mm and not more than 6mm, and the maximum u pper tibia acceleration shall not be less than 120g and not more than 250g in the dynamic certification test.