Design of an integrated crash safety test —— rear impact in subsequence of emergency braking

The integrated vehicle safety design provides larger pre-crash preparation time and design space for in crash occupant protection. However, the occupant's out-of-position (OOP) displacement caused by vehicle’s pre-crash emergency action also poses challenges to the conventional restraint system. Despite the long-term promotion of various integrated restraint systems by vehicle manufacturers, safety regulations and assessment protocols still basically focus on several standard crash testing. In this study, based on the findings that OOP displacement prior to a rear-end impact may significantly increase the injury parameters associated with whiplash injuries, we aimed to design a sled test protocol representing for a moderate rear impact in subsequence of emergency braking and explore the protective effectiveness of restraint systems provided by the vehicle manufacturers. The kinematic responses of BioRID II dummy and its finite element model, volunteer test and THUMS human body model were compared to discuss the effectiveness of the experimental design. Our study found that some so-called active trigger products claimed by the manufacturers may not successfully be activated in the emergency braking stage. And the neck whiplash injury parameters generally increase in rear-end collision following braking stage. The experiment we designed extends the protective requirements of integrated vehicle safety and imposes higher de-mands on the safety assessment bonus of the integrated restraint patterns.