The Development of IARV's for the Hybrid III Neck Modified for Dynamic Rollover Crash Testing

In the U.S., more than 27,000 catastrophic and fatal injuries occur annually in rollover crashes. This study is part of an ongoing research program aimed at mitigating these injuries. Recent papers introduced a prototype "soft" low-durometer Hybrid III neck design and presented results of matched-pair tests, comparing production and prototype Hybrid III neck responses. This paper • discusses neck injury criteria, and • proposes preliminary rollover injury criteria for the prototype "soft" low-durometer neck. Then, peak neck injury measures are used to calibrate the dynamic relationship for flexion bending between the tensed production Hybrid III neck IARV and: • the prototype "soft" low-durometer neck, which is representative of 1/3 tensed, and • the untensed cadaveric logistic regression curves for major flexion injury risk by Pintar et al.