Rollover crashes are responsible for more than 20% of total passengers deaths in vehicular accidents. Every year a higher number of consumers have been critically injured in rollovers, which translates into hundreds of millions of dollars of unnecessary health care cost. Efforts to reduce the incidence of death and catastrophic injuries associated with rollover crashes have increased the importance of both, prototype testing and computational simulations.
Automotive industry and individual researchers have performed numerous rollover tests using instrumented anthropomorphic test devices (ATD), with the objective of predicting possible head, neck, and cervical spine injuries. Some of these works measured accelerations, forces and moments on head, neck and cervical spines, which can cause several other injuries according to medical traumas databases.
The objective of the present work is to present finite element computational models used to simulate rollover crashes and the associated methodology to determine possible injuries in drivers. ATDs were considered in the computational models in order to estimate the severity of the injuries. The proposed methodology is also used to compare different standards and procedures. Finally, it is shown that the FMVSS 216 procedure is not able to estimate the real loads found during a rollover event.