Numerical investigation of impact injury of a human head during contact interaction with a windshield glazing considering mechanical failure

Abstract

In the context of a pedestrian-vehicle accident, the head of an adult pedestrian normally impacts the automotive windshield glazing, which mainly accounts for the pedestrian’s death. Consequently, it is of vital importance to investigate the head impact injury behaviour during interaction with the windshield glazing for the purpose of pedestrian safety protection. This paper presents a numerical approach to achieve this end. An intrinsic cohesive zone model is used to simulate the two main impact failure patterns, i.e., glass fracture and glass-PVB debonding, of the windshield glazing. The capacity of this model is validated by comparing the simulation results of a windshield glazing impacted by a pedestrian dummy headform with experimental ones in terms of acceleration histories. A finite element head model with detailed biomechanical features is established, whose effectiveness is validated with the aid of the experimental and simulation results in literature. Finally, parametric studies are performed to investigate the effects of impact velocity, head impact position, and windshield impacted location on head injury behaviour.