An evaluation methodology for motorcyclists’ wearable airbag protectors based on finite element simulations

Abstract A method to evaluate the effectiveness of wearable airbag protectors for motorcyclists is proposed in this work. The mitigation of thoracic injury severity in relevant accident conditions was investigated by a multimodel numerical approach. A set of impact conditions, obtained from previous work using multibody models, was used as input data to support the detailed analysis of injury risk with finite element models. The HUMOS II human model and an airbag model were validated from experimental data and coupled to evaluate the performance of the protector. Multiple frontal thoracic impact conditions were simulated on the human model by testing the airbag protector and reference simulations without any protection. A reduction on the skeletal AIS score of 1 was obtained, while the probability of sustaining severe soft tissue injuries was reduced by up to 22% with the safety device. Impact velocity and impactor shape were identified as relevant injury risk factors.

[1]  Manuel Mendoza-Vazquez,et al.  Construction and evaluation of thoracic injury risk curves for a finite element human body model in frontal car crashes. , 2015, Accident; analysis and prevention.

[2]  Koji Mizuno,et al.  Effects of Vehicle Impact Velocity, Vehicle Front-End Shapes on Pedestrian Injury Risk , 2012, Traffic injury prevention.

[3]  S. Bidal,et al.  Evaluation of a new security system to reduce thoracic injuries in case of motorcycle accidents , 2010 .

[4]  Joel D. Stitzel,et al.  Quantitative Validation of a Human Body Finite Element Model Using Rigid Body Impacts , 2015, Annals of Biomedical Engineering.

[5]  Mau-Roung Lin,et al.  A review of risk factors and patterns of motorcycle injuries. , 2009, Accident; analysis and prevention.

[6]  P. Arnoux,et al.  Investigation of motorcyclist safety systems contributions to prevent cervical spine injuries using HUMOS model , 2012 .

[7]  D. Bendjaballah,et al.  Numerical modelling and experimental analysis of the passenger side airbag deployment in out-of-position , 2017 .

[8]  Rémy Willinger,et al.  Behaviour of helmets during head impact in real accident cases of motorcyclists , 2012 .

[9]  M R Bambach,et al.  The rising burden of serious thoracic trauma sustained by motorcyclists in road traffic crashes. , 2014, Accident; analysis and prevention.

[10]  Pierre-Jean Arnoux,et al.  Analysis of trunk impact conditions in motorcycle road accidents based on epidemiological, accidentological data and multibody simulations. , 2019, Accident; analysis and prevention.

[11]  L Thollon,et al.  A Human Model for Road Safety: From Geometrical Acquisition to Model Validation with Radioss , 2003, Computer methods in biomechanics and biomedical engineering.

[12]  Donald Margolis,et al.  Three Steered Wheels for Ultimate Economy with Good Handling , 1986 .

[13]  D C Viano,et al.  Influence of impact velocity on the severity of nonpenetrating hepatic injury. , 1981, The Journal of trauma.

[14]  F. S. Gayzik,et al.  Development of a Full Body CAD Dataset for Computational Modeling: A Multi-modality Approach , 2011, Annals of Biomedical Engineering.

[15]  Yong Peng,et al.  Development of head injury risk functions based on real-world accident reconstruction , 2014 .

[16]  Rémy Willinger,et al.  Influence of pedestrian head surrogate and boundary conditions on head injury risk prediction , 2009 .

[17]  Ugo Galvanetto,et al.  Influence of the body on the response of the helmeted head during impact , 2011 .

[18]  Per Lövsund,et al.  A Human-Body 3D Mathematical Model for Simulation of Car-Pedestrian Impacts , 2000 .