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The objective of this work is to test the potential benefit of active pedestrian protection systems. The tests are based on real fatal accidents with passenger cars that were not equipped with active safety systems. Tests have been conducted in order to evaluate what the real benefit of the active safety system would be, and not to gain only a methodological prediction. The testing procedure was the first independent testing in the world which was based on real fatal pedestrian accidents. The aim of the tests is to evaluate the effectiveness of the Volvo pedestrian detection system. The in-depth accident database ZEDATU contains about 300 fatal pedestrian traffic accidents in urban areas. Eighteen cases of pedestrians hit by the front end of a passenger vehicle were extracted from this database. Cases covering an average traffic scenario have been reconstructed to obtain detailed model situations for testing.

Currently lithium-batteries are the most promising electrical-energy storage technology in fully-electric and hybrid vehicles. A crashworthy battery-design is among the numerous challenges development of electric-vehicles has to face. Besides of safe normal operation, the battery-design shall provide marginal threat to human health and environment in case of mechanical damage. Numerous mechanical abuse-tests were performed to identify load limits and the battery's response to damage. Cost-efficient testing is provided by taking into account that the battery-system's response to abuse might already be observed at a lower integration-level, not requiring testing of the entire pack. The most feasible tests and configurations were compiled and discussed. Adaptions of and additions to existing requirements and test-procedures as defined in standards are pointed out. Critical conditions that can occur during and after testing set new requirements to labs and test-rigs.

This research describes a different method of approach to evaluate the occupant kinematics and the acceleration pulse as well as injury criteria in different frontal impact scenarios. With the help of the stiffness based impact model of PC-Crash, input data for the multi body simulation code MADYMO was generated to evaluate occupant behavior in different vehicle-to-vehicle frontal impact scenarios. These results were compared and validated against a non linear finite element analysis (LS-Dyna) together with MADYMO to evaluate the accuracy of the PC-Crash/MADYMO analysis. The results show that the accuracy of the PC-Crash/MADYMO simulations are in close correlation to the LS-Dyna/MADYMO analysis in terms of vehicle acceleration pulse, post impact velocity, occupant acceleration as well as occupant kinematics, belt forces and injury criteria.