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Injury assessment by using a whole-body pedestrian dummy is one of the ways to investigate pedestrian safety performance of vehicles. The authors’ group has improved the biofidelity of the lower limb and the pelvis of the mid-sized male pedestrian dummy (POLAR III) by modifying those components. This study aims to evaluate the biofidelity of the whole-body response of the modified dummy in full-scale impact tests. The pelvis, the thigh and the leg of POLAR III have been modified in a past study by optimizing their compliance by means of the installation of plastic and rubber parts, which were used for the tests. The generic buck developed for the assessment of pedestrian dummy whole-body impact response and specified in SAE J3093 was used for this study. The buck representing the geometry of a small family car is comprised of six parts: lower bumper, bumper, grille, hood edge, hood and windshield.

Japanese accident statistics show that despite the decreasing trend of the overall traffic fatalities, more than 1,000 pedestrians are still killed annually in Japan. One way to develop further understanding of real-world pedestrian accidents is to reconstruct a variety of accident scenarios dynamically using computational models. Some of the past studies done by the authors' group have used a simplified vehicle model to investigate pedestrian lower limb injuries. However, loadings to the upper body also need to be reproduced to predict damage to the full body of a pedestrian. As a step toward this goal, this study aimed to develop a simplified vehicle model capable of reproducing pedestrian full-body kinematics and pelvis and lower limb injury measures. The simplified vehicle model was comprised of four parts: windshield, hood, bumper and lower part of the bumper. Several different models were developed using different combinations of geometric and stiffness representation.