Comparison of Femur Moments and Forces of EEVC WG17 Upper Leg Impactor, FlexPLI and Human Body Finite Element Model

EEVC WG17 Upper Leg impactors have been used to assess the risk of pedestrian upper leg injuries with respect to regulatory and consumer metric rating requirements. The paper compares the femur injury responses between the finite element models of the EEVC WG17 Upper Leg impactor, the FlexPLI and the 50th percentile male GM/UVa pedestrian model on two sample vehicle architectures, for a sedan and a sports utility vehicle.

The study shows that the peak femur load and maximum bending moment response are higher in the EEVC WG17 Upper Leg impactor than the FlexPLI and the human body model. Variation studies are carried out to study the influence of impact location on the vehicle, impactor knee height, additional upper body mass and human body model size on the femur injury responses. The FlexPLI femur responses correlate better with those of the human body model and indicate that the impactor has the potential to be an effective surrogate leg form of a pedestrian with appropriate refinement.