The influence of a flexible lumbar spine in far-side impact testing

摘要

Recent findings have shown the nearside impact dummies BioSID and EuroSID to be less applicable in far-side testing. In this paper, the lumbar spine of a BioSID dummy was replaced with a coil spring to enable a more extensive shearing, bending and elongation of the dummy spine. Using a sled test method developed to replicate a 65-km/h impact full-scale far-side test, the kinematics and injury measures of the modified dummy were compared to a Post Mortem Human Subject (PMHS) full-scale crash. These results showed that the dummy trajectory and acceleration measures reasonably predicted the PMHS movement although further validation is required. Also, a series of BioSID far-side sled tests was performed with and without the spine modification during various loading conditions. These results showed the spring to remarkably change the Head Injury Criteria (HIC) values, kinematics, and loads. In conclusion, the spring spine 'when fitted to the BioSID test dummy,' was found to be suitable to manifest injurious test circumstances in accordance with the PMHS test as well as real-life crashes, although more research is clearly needed.