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This is a summary of a paper which first appeared in the International Journal of Crashworthiness under the title: “Side Impact Protection - Occupants in the Far-Side Seat”, Vol. 3, No.2, pp 93-122. Readers are directed to the full paper for a more comprehensive discussion of the issues presented here. Much of the applied vehicle side impact occupant protection research to date has concentrated on occupants seated beside the struck side of vehicles. These occupants are defined as ‘near-side’ occupants. Real world crash evidence however has shown that occupants seated on the side away from the struck side, defined as ‘far-side’ occupants, are still subject to a risk of injury. This paper examines side impact epidemiology from an injury causation perspective, and endeavours to explain evidence indicating head injuries and seat belt related injuries constitute a significant proportion of all far-side impact injuries.

A preliminary case-control study of passenger airbag deployments in frontal crashes (in which a passenger was present) was undertaken. The study was conducted as part of an on-going study of vehicle crash performance and occupant injury at Monash University Accident Research Center (MUARC). The results of this preliminary study suggest that the US experience of fatalities caused by interaction of the passenger with the deploying airbag is not shared in Australia. This is probably because the seat-belt use in this study was 100%. These preliminary results reinforce the view that such airbags should be used as supplementary restraint systems. Further studies are planned to monitor the performance of passenger-airbags and to provide more in-depth analyses when more data become available.

This study presents some results from a case-control study of crashed vehicles equipped with Australian airbag technology (Supplementary Restraint Systems). Vehicles were inspected and occupants interviewed according to the National Accident Sampling System (NASS). Data were available for 383 belted drivers involved in frontal crashes including 253 drivers in airbag-equipped vehicles and 130 drivers in non-airbag vehicles. The analysis revealed reductions in the numbers of injuries to the head, face, chest and neck in the airbag-equipped vehicles although the numbers of upper extremity injuries increased. At higher injury severities (AIS2+) reductions were also observed in injuries to the head, face, neck and chest. Further analysis using Harm as an outcome measure found that the mean Harm per driver (in terms of $AUD) were 60% greater in the non-airbag vehicles compared with the airbag-equipped vehicles.

The objective of the ISIP Project has been to develop a methodology to allow vehicle designers to optimize safety systems of vehicles in side impacts. This optimization was based on the minimization of the cost of injury or Harm. To form the link between the safety system protective capability in a crash and the cost of injury to the occupant required the development of a series of lateral impact Injury Assessment Functions (IAFs). These IAFs had to be able to predict the risk of injury, in AIS, for each of the major body regions of the occupant. The injury predictions were used to derive Harm for the crash and were based on the responses of a human surrogate, the BioSID. This paper describes the development of these lateral injury IAFs from the analysis of cadaver test data.

Vehicle crash compatibility is of major interest in road safety research as it focuses on both vehicle crashworthiness and aggressivity. Most of the research into vehicle safety to date has focused on vehicle crashworthiness promoting vehicle designs that overlook the protection of occupants in the ‘other’ vehicle in a vehicle-to-vehicle collision. Most recently this issue has lead to the development of new methods of vehicle aggressivity rating. This study presents two proposed vehicle aggressivity rating methods. The ‘subject’ car aggressivity is estimated based on injury outcome to the driver of the ‘other’ vehicle involved in a two-vehicle collision. The logistic regression technique is applied in order to adjust risk of driver injury for a number of endogenous and exogenous factors. The ability of the methods to ‘rate’ vehicle models in terms of their aggressivity performance in two-vehicle crashes is briefly described.

This paper provides a summary of preliminary results of three car-to-car 90-degree lateral impact crash tests with initially restrained Hybrid III and US-SID dummies. These tests comprised part of a collaborative research project between Monash University, Autoliv Australia and the Royal Automobile Club of Victoria. The overall research project objectives were to investigate the nature of non-struck side occupant injuries in automobile side impacts and to develop technical solutions to reduce these injuries. The test program results showed that a sash belt with a pretensioner and good geometry was effective in reducing occupant lateral excursions and lap belt loads. An increase in occupant neck loading was however observed and measured. Lateral torso seat restraints helped to prevent direct contacts between adjacent occupants resulting in a reduced HIC measured for a non-struck side occupant dummy.

Previous studies have shown that both excessive linear and rotational accelerations are the cause of head injuries. Although the head injury criterion has been beneficial as an indicator of head injury risk, it only considers linear acceleration, so there is a need to consider both types of motion in future safety standards. Advanced models of the head/brain complex have recently been developed to gain a better understanding of head injury biomechanics. While these models have been verified against laboratory experimental data, there is a lack of suitable real-world data available for validation. Hence, using two computer models of the head/brain, the objective of the current study was to reconstruct four real-world crashes with known head injury outcomes in a full-vehicle crash laboratory, simulate head/brain responses using kinematics obtained during these reconstructions, and to compare the results predicted by the models against the actual injuries sustained by the occupant.