Effect of Tissue Erosion Modeling Techniques on Pedestrian Impact Kinematics

The pedestrian is one of the most vulnerable road users and has experienced increased numbers of injuries and deaths caused by car-to-pedestrian collisions over the last decade. To curb this trend, finite element models of pedestrians have been developed to investigate pedestrian protection in vehicle impact simulations. While useful, modeling practices vary across research groups, especially when applying knee/ankle ligament and bone failure. To help better standardize modeling practices this study explored the effect of knee ligament and bone element elimination on pedestrian impact outcomes. A male 50th percentile model was impacted by three European generic vehicles at 30, 40, and 50 km/h. The pedestrian model was set to three element elimination settings: the “Off-model” didn’t allow any element erosion, the “Lig-model” allowed lower-extremity ligament erosion, and the “All-model” allowed lower-extremity ligament and bone erosion. Failure toggling had a significant effect on impact outcomes (0 < p ≤ 0.03). The head impact time response was typically the smallest for the “Off-model” while the wrap around distance response was always largest for the All-model. Moderate differences in maximum vehicle-pedestrian contact forces across elimination techniques were reported in this study (0.1 – 1.7 kN). Future work will examine additional failure modelling approaches, model anthropometries and vehicles to expand this investigation.