DESIGN AND VALIDATION OF A COMPONENT HEAD INJURY CRITERIA TESTER FOR AEROSPACE APPLICATIONS

摘要

The compliance with Head Injury Criteria (HIC) specified in 14 CFR 23.562 and CFR 25.562 poses a significant problem for many segments of the aerospace industry. The airlines and the manufacturers of jet transports have made claims of high costs and significant schedule overruns during the development and certification of 16G seats because of the difficulties encountered in meeting this requirement. The current practice is to conduct Full Scale Sled Tests (FSST) on impact sleds. This approach can be expensive, since a new seat may be needed for each test. Moreover, some consider the HIC sensitive to changes in the test conditions, such as sled pulse, seat belt elongation, etc., resulting in HIC results from FSSTs showing poor repeatability. These difficulties make it desirable to devise a cheaper, faster, and more repeatable alternative to FSSTs. This paper describes an attempt to address these issues by designing a device, the National Institute for Aviation Research (NIAR) HIC Component Tester (NHCT) using various multibody tools. This device was then fabricated and its performance evaluated against FSSTs conducted under similar test conditions for some typical impact events that occur in an aircraft cabins e.g. impact with bulkheads. The factors compared for this evaluation are the head impact angle, head impact velocity, HIC, HIC window, peak head C.G. resultant acceleration, average head C.G. resultant acceleration, and head C.G. resultant acceleration profiles. The results of these evaluations show that the NHCT already produces test results that correlate significantly with FSST results for impact targets such as bulkheads and its target envelope is expected eventually to include objects such as seat backs.