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Pediatric pedestrians are frequently involved in Pedestrian versus Motor Vehicle Collisions (PMVCs). While in recent years, the automotive industry has worked towards making cars less aggressive to pedestrians, the efforts have mainly focused on adult pedestrian safety. When they have included considerations for children, only head injuries have been evaluated. The development of automotive counter-measures that provide protection for both adult and pediatric pedestrians requires access to injury criteria for the entire body that specifically account for both the age-dependent tissue properties and the pedestrian's size. The objective of the present study is to derive lateral injury criteria for the head, neck, thorax, abdomen and pelvis that can be used in finite element and multi-body simulations of PMVCs involving the 6-year-old pedestrian (corresponding injury criteria for the upper and lower extremities are derived in part II of this study).

Pediatric pedestrians are frequently involved in Pedestrian versus Motor Vehicle Collisions (PMVCs). While in recent years, the automotive industry has worked towards making cars less aggressive to pedestrians, the efforts have mainly focused on adult pedestrian safety. When they have included considerations for children, only head injuries have been evaluated. The development of automotive countermeasures that provide protection for both adult and pediatric pedestrians requires access to injury criteria for the entire body that specifically account for both the age-dependent tissue properties and the pedestrian's size. The objective of the present study is to derive lateral injury criteria for the upper and lower extremities that can be used in finite element and multi-body simulations of PMVCs involving the 6-year-old pedestrian (corresponding injury criteria for the head, neck, thorax, abdomen and pelvis are derived in part I of this study).

Fatalities resulting from vehicle rollover events account for over one-third of all U.S. motor vehicle occupant fatalities. While a great deal of research has been directed towards the rollover problem, few studies have attempted to determine the sensitivity of occupant injury risk to variations in the vehicle (roof strength), crash (kinematic conditions at roof-to-ground contact), and occupant (anthropometry, position and posture) parameters that define the conditions of the crash. A two-part computational study was developed to examine the sensitivity of injury risk to changes in these parameters. The first part of this study, the Crash Parameter Sensitivity Study (CPSS), demonstrated the influence of parameters describing the vehicle and the crash on vehicle response using LS-DYNA finite element (FE) simulations.

The goal of this study was to develop and validate a finite element (FE) model of the Polar-II pedestrian dummy. An upper body model consisting of the head, neck, shoulder, thorax, and abdomen was coupled with a previously validated model of the lower limb The viscoelastic material properties of the dummy components were determined from dynamic compression tests of shoulder urethane, shoulder rubber and abdominal foam. For validation of the entire upper body, the model was compared with NHTSA response requirements for their advanced frontal dummy (Thor) including head and neck pendulum tests as well as ribcage and abdominal impact tests. In addition, the Polar-II full body FE model was subjected to simulated vehicle-pedestrian impacts that recreated published experiments. Simulated head and pelvis accelerations as well as upper body trajectories reasonably reproduced the experiment.

Given the quantity and severity of head injuries to pedestrians in vehicle-to-pedestrian collisions, human pedestrian finite element models and pedestrian dummies must possess a biofidelic head/neck response to accurately reproduce head-strike kinematics and kinetics. Full-scale pedestrian impact experiments were performed on post-mortem human surrogates (PMHS) using a mid-sized sport utility vehicle and a small sedan. Kinematics of the head and torso were obtained with a six-degree-of-freedom (6DOF) cube, which contained three orthogonally mounted linear accelerometers and three angular rate sensors. The goal of the current study was to present a methodology for analyzing the data obtained from the sensors on each cube, and to use the kinematics data to calculate spatial trajectories, as well as linear velocities and angular accelerations of the head and T1 vertebra.

Multibody human models are widely used to investigate responses of human during an automotive crash. This study aimed to validate a commercially available multibody human body model against response corridors from volunteer tests conducted by Naval BioDynamics Laboratory (NBDL). The neck model consisted of seven vertebral bodies, and two adjacent bodies were connected by three orthogonal linear springs and dampers and three orthogonal rotational springs and dampers. The stiffness and damping characteristics were scaled up or down to improve the biofidelity of the neck model against NBDL volunteer test data because those characteristics were encrypted due to confidentiality. First, sensitivity analysis was performed to find influential scaling factors among the entire set using a design of experiment.