Door Interior Trim Safety Enhancement Strategies for the SID-IIs Dummy

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) has begun a new side impact crashworthiness evaluation of vehicles, using tests that represent impacts from large trucks and sport utility vehicles. This test protocol, intended as consumer information rating of vehicles, adds new challenges to current side impact crashworthiness development in both the vehicle structure and dummy responses. Available tests data seem to indicate that safety enhancement features that work for current US-SID and Euro-SID may not work for the SID-IIs dummy that is used in the IIHS test protocol, but may in fact deteriorate dummy response. This may partly be explained by the fact that the SID-IIs is not a scaled down dummy of either the US-SID or the Euro-SID.

This paper presents and discusses the results from sled tests conducted to investigate countermeasures that will help improve the response of the SID-IIs in the Insurance Institute's side impact test. The two primary objectives of the tests are to (a) investigate the effectiveness of countermeasures in reducing the peak deflection of the rib and abdomen regions of the SID-IIs and (b) derive design implications from the test results. A secondary objective is to establish a simple study tool for sorting through different side impact countermeasures at the early stages of vehicle program development. The results show that (a) “a geometric effect” strategy that induces load leads, within limits on the shoulder and pelvis regions of the dummy and shunts loads on the thorax and abdomen regions is very effective in reducing thorax and abdomen ribs deflections of the SID-IIs, (b) foam padding in the thorax and abdomen regions does not seem to reduce deformations in these regions and may in fact have opposite effects, and (c) even though impact velocity is an influential parameter, door trim treatments of the vehicle interior can have a significant moderating effect on the dummy response.