Impact Injury Simulation

摘要

Advancements in motor vehicle crash safety design are dependent on the ability ofdesign engineers and government safety officials to measure the injury mitigation potential of safety systems. The ultimate instrument for this purpose is the anthropomorphic test device, or crash dummy. In addition to improved crash dummies, computer simulations of the responses of humans in the crash environment offer unique benefits to the safety community. Occupant crash simulation studies help improve the design of the next generation of dummies; alternative designs can be modeled and compared with existing dummies to assess response differences in a variety of modeled crash environments. Numerous impediments exist which prevent the full potential of occupant simulation models from being realized. The research undertaken by the University of Virginia under a CDC Injury Control Research Grant is directed toward identifying the principal impediments, developing the software enhancements needed to overcome them, and applying models to some of the critical problems which are not easily addressed by testing with existing dummies. Our research is focused on modeling occupant motion in frontal crashes, which account for about half of the serious injuries and deaths of vehicle occupants.