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In order to protect occupants from the risk of serious injury in event of side impact, passenger vehicles are designed to fulfil specific legislative and consumer impact test requirements. These are generally different for each of the major markets of the world. The tests use different configurations and percentile dummies (anthropomorphic test devices). Aside from the problem of finding an optimal design, the reliable evaluation of the robustness, i.e. the sensitivity of unavoidable scatter of design variables due to the structural response, is becoming increasingly important. For this purpose simulation is a well established tool in the development process in the automotive industry. The integration of FE-dummies and restraint systems in side impact simulations enables the study of the effect of dummy loading. ABAQUS/Explicit is a promising new software package for gaining more accuracy in crashworthiness and occupant protection simulations.

Sport Activity Vehicle (SAV) share a growing market of an entirely new class of vehicles. Outstanding comfort in traditional on-road and also off-road terrain combined with leading edge technology are basic features of this concept. But in addition to that, the SAV has to offer the same overall safety features, expected by e.g. a luxury-segment sedan. A way to ensure the BMW X5 becoming one of the safest cars was the consequent use of simulation techniques in passive safety development. This paper deals with introduction of a CAE driven development process for passive safety in the BMW X5 project, focusing on examples in front and side impact.

Evaluation of safety benefits is an essential task during design and development of pedestrian protection systems. Comparative evaluation of different safety concepts is facilitated by a common metric taking into account the expected human benefits. Translation of physical characteristics of a collision, such as impact speed, into human benefits requires reliable and preferably evidence-based injury models. To this end, the dependence of injury severity of body regions on explanatory factors is quantified here using the US Pedestrian Crash Data Study (PCDS) for pedestrians in frontal vehicle collisions. The explanatory and causal factors include vehicle component characteristics, physiological and biomechanical variables, and crash parameters. Severe to serious injuries most often involve the head, thorax and lower extremities.

Optimizing protection for side impact in vehicle design requires valid information about occupant behavior under lateral loading. For this reason a comparison of numerical models of dummies and human body in side impact scenarios is shown to estimate the benefits of using numerical human models in future safety design. First a well-known sled test set up was simulated to compare the two devices in a defined surrounding. After looking at the kinematics, the loads, accelerations and injury values of the occupants were derived and compared to each other. Second the occupant models were positioned in a vehicle model to compare their behavior in a more complex loading case, such as an EuroNCAP Barrier Test. Focus of this investigation was the injury mechanism occurring in the human model. The Behavior of the Dummy and H-Model is comparable and shows similar responses in a global view.