Citation

Eichberger A, Steiner J, Breitenhuber W, Wernig J. Proc. IRCOBI 2002; 30.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2002, International Research Council on Biomechanics of Injury)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Until 2002 the complete car fleet to be sold on the US market has to fulfill FMVSS201u (Free Motion Headform) legislation (DOT, 2000). It includes a test procedure using a free flying headform (FMH) that impacts several specified points on the upper car interior with a speed up to 24kph. Injury criterion is HIC(d), a modified HIC with a tolerance limit of 1000. The purpose of this paper is to give an idea if this legislation has potential to reduce head injuries, based on Finite-Element calculations.

Results of this study suggest that FMVSS 201u should be updated in order to more precisely evaluate the risk for head/brain injury. We propose either to replace the test object by a spherical headform that has only one degree of freedom in the impacting direction or - in case of keeping the 201u test setup - to modify the injury criterion by a combination of HIC and rotational tolerance criteria. We are planning to extent this study with hardware testing.