THE EUROPEAN SIDE IMPACT DUMMY “EUROSID” has been extensively tested in European Laboratories over recent years. The Federal Highway Research Institute (BASt) has participated - together with TRRL in Great Britain, INRETS and APR in France and TNO in the Netherlands - in a research project called “EUROSID Evaluation Program”, which was partly sponsored by the European Community. The objective of the BASt's investigation was to examine the behaviour of the EUROSID - here especially the repeatability, the sensitivity, the durability and the dummy handling - in full scale tests and to compare dummy results of different test configurations.
For the latter question five side impact tests were conducted with a Volkswagen Golf I (Rabbit) as test car and a movable defortnable barrier with EEVC IV element. The test condition selected were the European proposal for side impact testing with the 90 degrees impact angle and the US proposal with the crabbed mode of deformable barrier, both equipped with EEVC barrier faces.
In progress at present is a series of side impact tests with different (small) cars and a series with different modifications of car's side structure (door rail, inner door padding), in order to prove if the EUROSID is able to detect these improvements.
Some of these results - mainly related to the dummy criteria repeatability, sensitivity and handling -were published at the 11th ESV Conference. A detailed analysis and interpretation of the difference in the test configurations in the EUROSID results will be given here.