Introduction of Two New Pediatric Finite Element Models for Pedestrian and Occupant Protections

To help predict the injury responses of child pedestrians and occupants in traffic incidents, finite element (FE) modeling has become a common research tool. Until now, there was no whole-body FE model for 10-year-old (10 YO) children. This paper introduces the development of two 10 YO whole-body pediatric FE models (named CHARM-10) with a standing posture to represent a pedestrian and a seated posture to represent an occupant with sufficient anatomic details. The geometric data was obtained from medical images and the key dimensions were compared to literature data. Component-level sub-models were built and validated against experimental results of post mortem human subjects (PMHS). Most of these studies have been mostly published previously and briefly summarized in this paper. For the current study, focus was put on the late stage model development. After integrating all the sub-models to form the whole-body pedestrian model (standing), a set of positioning procedures was conducted to transform the pedestrian model into the occupant model (seated). In whole-body impact simulations, both FE models have shown marginally acceptable responses when compared to experimental data or other simulation results. However, lack of experimental data on pediatric subjects prevents further validations of these two models.