Citation

Yonezawa H, Mizuno K, Hirasawa T, Kanoshima H, Ichikawa H, Yamada S, Koga H, Yamagucjhi A, Arai Y. Proc. Int. Tech. Conf. Enhanced Safety Vehicles 2009; 2009.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, In public domain, Publisher National Highway Traffic Safety Administration)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In 2006, the Transport Policy Council's Report in Japan stated that it is necessary to discuss compatibility improvement considering the traffic accident environment in Japan. In response to this report, the MLIT has launched the Compatibility Working Group in Japan. This paper summarizes the activities of the WG toward the compatibility improvement. In the WG, accident analyses and crash tests were performed to identify the safety problem. From global accident data, it is shown that as the front rail of the opposite (or collision partner) car was higher, the injury risk to the occupant tended to be higher. Full frontal car-to-car crash tests were conducted to investigate height matching and mismatching conditions of front rails. It was suggested that matching the front rail heights between two cars provides an overall safety benefit for occupant protection, though the leg injuries may became worse. From the accident analysis and crash tests, it was recognized in the WG that the matching of the front rail heights could be the first issue to be investigated for compatibility improvement. To evaluate the height of front rails, geometrical measurements and analysis of crash test data can be considered. The footprint of the front rails can be observed in the measured barrier force distribution of a full-width rigid barrier test. Accordingly, to evaluate the front rail heights, measurement and evaluation of the barrier force distribution using high-resolution load cells in a full-width rigid barrier test was investigated. Several methods were developed and proposed for evaluating the front rail heights based on the barrier force distributions. The full text of this paper may be found at: http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/esv/esv21/09-0203.pdf