The Variation of Human Tolerance to Impact and Its Effect on the Design and Testing of Automotive Impact Performance

780885

02/01/1978

Event
22nd Stapp Car Crash Conference
Authors Abstract
Content
One of the major difficulties in the safety design of motor vehicles is the variability of road accidents. This variability arises in part from the external accident conditions, such as the direction and velocity of impact, and also in part from the variation of the occupant, including such factors as size, weight, location and impact tolerance. The effect of such variability is to undermine the validity of a “typical accident” approach, in which a design is tested at a single speed with a single size of dummy and a single injury criterion.
Working from a statistical approach, using methods originating from statistical mechanics, this paper derives a quantitative measure of the injury probability, taken over the whole spectrum of road accidents. This gives an objective measure of injuries taken over the whole population of car occupants and accident situations, and therefore provides an assessment of the vehicle's impact injury potential which is more closely related to the road situations.
The paper also includes a solution of the related optimisation problem, that is the provision of the optimum force/deflection characteristic (within a given space) to minimise the injuries on the road.
Meta TagsDetails
DOI
https://doi.org/10.4271/780885
Pages
13
Citation
Searle, J., Bethell, J., and Baggaley, G., "The Variation of Human Tolerance to Impact and Its Effect on the Design and Testing of Automotive Impact Performance," SAE Technical Paper 780885, 1978, https://doi.org/10.4271/780885.
Additional Details
Publisher
Published
Feb 1, 1978
Product Code
780885
Content Type
Technical Paper
Language
English