Submarining is a phenomenon that may appear during the restraining of an occupant by a safety belt and it is ascribed to an important lesional factor mainly on the abdominal body segment and lumbar spine.
This paper presents a literature overview and an in depth analysis of an accident survey which indicate that even if submarining may exist, it does not constitute a “safety belt syndrome” when considering the frequency of abdominal lesions. But these lesions are fairly often severe.
As regards the approval standards tests, it is necessary to define an abdominal protection criterion. At present, two types of transducers are proposed for the display of submarining on the part 572 dummy and one of them, moreover, can be associated with an abdominal criterion. Our experimental study enabled us to compare the capabilities of the transducers.
It is our feeling that these transducers can only be useful for the detection of submarining and that an abdominal protection criterion is still lacking. Moreover, it appears that some particular aspects of the human body model should be re-examinated in the abdomen-pelvis region in order to check that the dummy presents an acceptable “human-like” behaviour.