Citation

Sáez LM, Casanova LJG, Fazio EA, Álvarez AG. Int. J. Crashworthiness 2011; 17(1): 1-10.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2011, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/13588265.2011.616117

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The European pedestrian regulations (formerly Directive 2003/102 and currently Regulation 2009/631 and recently modified by Commission Regulation [EU] No. 2011/459) have always approached the protection of lower extremities in pedestrian accidents with tests in the front part of the vehicle using rigid impactors. This approach offers a lot of advantage regarding the repeatability, robustness and reproducibility that these tests need but on the contrary decouple the injury occurrence through the different body areas. It is widely supported to approach pedestrian head protection and lower extremities protection in separate tests; however, there is not such consensus in decoupling pedestrian lower leg injuries from the upper leg injuries, especially in the case of high bumper vehicles. The objective of this paper is to look into the details of this close dependence through a set of simulations with THUMS 50th percentile male pedestrian finite element human model impacted by a wide set of high bumper vehicles. The analysis of both the kinematics and the injury occurrence in these scenarios has shown the strong coupling between the upper and lower leg injuries for this vehicle fleet, requiring therefore assessing both type of injuries at the same time.