Effects of Impact Location, Impact Angle and Impact Speed on Head Injury Risk of Vietnamese Pedestrian Hit by a Sedan

摘要

This paper employed finite-element simulation together with a human body model (HBM) - THUMS to study the head injury risk of a pedestrian involved in a frontal impact with a sedan car. While previous studies have gained an intensive understanding of the effects of various factors on pedestrian injury, their results were mainly based on standard-sized HBMs. Hence, a scaling procedure was first applied for the THUMS to obtain a model that possesses Vietnamese anthropometry. A total of thirty simulations were conducted to investigate the effect of various parameters, including impact angle, impact location, and impact speed, on the head injury criterion (HIC) of the scaled THUMS. Besides, each simulation covered not only the car-to-pedestrian impact but also the pedestrian-to-ground impact. Thus, the head injury of the pedestrian in both primary impact and secondary impact could be evaluated. Results showed that HIC increased consistently with impact speed for primary impact. An impact at the center of the car was more critical than that at the corner. Whereas, the effect of impact angle varied depending on the impact location. Regarding the secondary impact, HIC value was found to be highly sensitive to the posture of the pedestrian before impacting to the ground. In most cases, HIC was much higher in secondary impact than in primary impact. In other words, secondary impact poses a high risk of fatality to pedestrians in a traffic accident.