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The pole side impact test has been mandatory in Euro NCAP since 2009 and it includes, in addition to the head, assessments on other critical body regions that might be affected such as the chest, abdomen and pelvis. This paper describes a new test method for predicting Anthropomorphic Test Device responses to calculate injury index in side impact tests of a rigid pole under Euro NCAP conditions. Simplified sled tests are very effective in reducing the cost and time of development of more advanced side impact safety devices. To accomplish sled tests successfully, it is necessary to reconstruct accurately the combined dynamic deformation behavior of door and seat in pole impact. That behavior varies among different dummy response regions. Conventional sled test methods, published in previous literature, can reconstruct the deformation of the entire door using a single actuator at constant intrusion velocity but actual door velocity isn't constant in full scale vehicle crash tests.

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.

The aim of this study was to assess the feasibility of using a high speed x-ray system (capable of 1000 frames/sec) to evaluate the bony kinematics of post mortem human surrogate (PMHS) cervical spines at real world speeds during frontal impact. Whole body frontal impact sled tests were performed on two fresh PMHS specimens. Screws were inserted into the tips of the spinal processes to optimize contrast on the high speed cine x-ray. Head, T1 and sternum accelerations, as well as shoulder, and lap belt forces were recorded. Vertebral motion was captured using a modified mobile c arm x-ray system, and an image intensifier linked to a high speed camera (Kodak motion corder analyzer, model SR 1000C, Kodak, San Diego, CA, USA) The variable parameters for the tests were camera frame rate and sled velocity. Tests were performed with delta-V’s (Δv) of approximately 15 kph (8G) and 21 kph (10G). Cine x-rays of the tests were recorded at 250, 500 and 1000 frames/sec.