A New Concept for Occupant Deceleration Control in a Crash - Part 2

In order to minimize occupant injury in a vehicle crash, an approach was attempted to address this issue by making the wave form of vehicle body deceleration optimal to lower the maximum value of the occupant deceleration. Prior study shows that the mathematical solutions for the optimal vehicle deceleration wave form feature consisting of three aspects: high deceleration, negative deceleration, and constant deceleration.

A kinematical model which has separated mass of the vehicle was devised to generate an optimal vehicle deceleration wave form which consists of three segments including a segment of negative deceleration in the middle. The validity of this model has been certified by a mathematical study by using a one-dimensional lumped mass model. The effectiveness of the optimal vehicle deceleration wave form generated by this method was validated by a simulation with a three-dimensional dummy.

An apparatus based on the physical model which consists of two separated mass was devised to confirm the results obtained from the three-dimensional dummy simulation. An experiment was conducted by utilizing an actual dummy and this apparatus. The experimental results show that the response of an actual dummy closely agrees with that of the three-dimensional simulated dummy.