A Computational Study to Determine the Severity of Injuries in the Driver of Passenger Car and Sport Utility Vehicle Due to Rollover Accidents

摘要

Every year a higher number of consumers have been critically injured in vehicular accidents, which translates into hundreds of millions of dollars of unnecessary health care cost. Rollover crashes continue to be a growing source of motor vehicle injuries and deaths in the world. Consequently, there has been considerable interest in identifying relationships between rollover severity and injury severity. The purpose of this work is to analyze the probability of injuries in the head and neck regions of drivers due to rollover accidents. Traumas in these regions are responsible for the more severe injuries in the vehicular accidents. Furthermore this study compares the severity of injuries between passenger cars and sport utility vehicles (SUV). To quantify the severity of injuries were developed numerical models using the 50th percentile hybrid III dummies to perform computational simulations in order to estimate accelerations, forces and deflections in the different parts of the dummies body. Due to these mechanical loads some regions of the body can undergo mechanical or psychological changes. One of the difficulties in analyzing rollover crashes and designing countermeasures is the lack of a standard measure of crash severity. Even though, the present work shows that numerical simulation using dummies is able to assist engineers to quantify the trauma severity and then to design safer vehicles. The need to reduce death incidence and serious injuries has been increasing the importance of computational simulations and prototype testing.