Finite Element Analysis of Pedestrian-City Car Collisions to Assist Design of Pedestrian Friendly Front Structure

Car-to-pedestrian collisions often cause serious injuries and deaths dramatically as pedestrians do not have any protection equipment. In order to design the front structure to be safer for pedestrians, it is necessary to understand kinematics and injury mechanisms of car-pedestrian collisions which can be obtained through the costly full-scale crash test of a dummy or a cadaver. Finite element simulations are an alternative mean which offer information of post-crash kinematics and injury mechanisms. This paper has presented finite element simulations of pedestrian-city car collisions by simulating legform impact test for assessment and validation. It has also been employed to simulate the full-scale pedestrian crash test. The post-crash kinematics and injury mechanisms of the pedestrian have been analysed. With the kinematics and injury information, the bumper beam of the front end of the car has been simply modified by introducing Al 6082 T6 to the bumper beam. The dynamics responses and injury parameters for head, chest, tibia and femur have been reduced significantly. These show that the car-to-pedestrian collision model can be employed to assist design and development of pedestrian friendly front structure of a vehicle.