A Potential New Approach for the Evaluation of Occupant Response in Frontal Impact Scenarios

This research describes a different method of approach to evaluate the occupant kinematics and the acceleration pulse as well as injury criteria in different frontal impact scenarios. With the help of the stiffness based impact model of PC-Crash, input data for the multi body simulation code MADYMO was generated to evaluate occupant behavior in different vehicle-to-vehicle frontal impact scenarios. These results were compared and validated against a non linear finite element analysis (LS-Dyna) together with MADYMO to evaluate the accuracy of the PC-Crash/MADYMO analysis.

The results show that the accuracy of the PC-Crash/MADYMO simulations are in close correlation to the LS-Dyna/MADYMO analysis in terms of vehicle acceleration pulse, post impact velocity, occupant acceleration as well as occupant kinematics, belt forces and injury criteria.