Stiffness Corridors of the European Fleet for Pedestrian Simulations

Multibody simulations of pedestrian impact scenarios as well as pedestrian accident reconstructions have been used and improved through the years to enhance the pedestrian protection (Lestrelin 1980, Wismans 1982 to Van Hoof 2003, Yao 2005). In these years, pedestrian multibody models have been developed and validated extensively but there has not been a uniform approach to the pedestrian-vehicle contact interactions. In general, the reference values used for the stiffnesses of the impacted cars were individually obtained for each car through testing (Mizuno 2000) or through FEM simulations (Van Rooij 2003). This paper aims to define and supply to the research community appropriate and wide test based estimates on the stiffnesses of the European vehicles front parts for pedestrian simulations through the development of a set of stiffness corridors based on the pedestrian subsystem tests from European New Car Assessment Program (EuroNCAP) Based on the 425 tests that EuroNCAP has made available for APROSYS SP3 sub-project, this paper defines procedures to derive the vehicle stiffness out of these pedestrian tests. Moreover, these methodologies are applied extensively to these 425 tests to build a set of stiffness corridors for the different vehicle front parts areas. Finally, some guidelines are included in the paper to use appropriately the obtained corridors to simulate properly the different current European vehicles.