Identification of the viscoelastic characteristics of an artificial neck

Abstract This paper is devoted to the identification of the viscoelastic characteristics of an artificial neck employed to conduct experiments on dummies in automobile crash simulation tests. The neck is assumed to be a linear viscoelastic cantilever beam subject to a bending moment and a shear force at the head-neck junction. Time histories of these forces and the associated rotation obtained in a calibration test simulating an automobile crash condition are available and furnished by the manufacturer of the neck. Using these data, an identification procedure in the Laplace transform space is developed. The analytical relationships between forces and displacements at the head-neck junction are presented in Sec. 2, and the viscoelastic model is introduced in Sec. 3. In Sec. 4, the identification problem is formulated, and in Sec. 5 an example displaying experimental versus predicted results is presented. Finally in Sec. 6 an extension to consider higher dimensional representations is outlined.