Citation

Majumder S, Roychowdhury A, Pal S. Int. J. Veh. Safety 2008; 3(4): 338-350.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2008, Inderscience Publishers)

DOI

10.1504/IJVS.2008.025075

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Pelvic injuries and fractures, caused by intrusion of car door structure due to car side impacts, are a serious problem worldwide. A 'car door padding', modelled with expanded polystyrene foam (EPS), is suggested in this study. This padding, formed with five layers of foams with different stiffness, is to be incorporated between the car door interior and outer body surface, around greater trochanter location of the occupant for protection from pelvic fracture (pubic rami fracture). To simplify the situation, in this finite element study the padding was fitted with a rigid impactor to hit the previously developed finite element model of the pelvis-femur-soft tissue complex with simplified representation of the whole body in occupant posture. It was observed that this padding has the capacity to reduce the risk of pubic rami fracture in case of car side impact for the occupants with the attenuation of peak impact force by 63% and a considerable reduction in peak strain by 91%. For the five-layered padding, the non-linear stiffness variations of EPS ('high to low' or 'low to high' across the pad thickness) also have an effect on the peak impact force, though less pronounced and it can be concluded that 'low to high' combination is preferred over 'high to low' combination.