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Steering control devices are used by people who have difficulty gripping the steering wheel. These devices have projections that may extend up to 14 cm toward the occupant. Testing indicated that contact with certain larger steering control devices with tall rigid projections could severely injure a driver in a frontal collision. In order to reduce this injury risk, an alternative, less injurious design was developed and tested. This design, which included replacing unyielding aluminum projections with compliant plastic ones, produced significantly lower peak contact pressure and less damage to the chest of a cadaver test subject, while maintaining the strength necessary to be useful.

This paper describes the results of a study conducted to evaluate the performance and accuracy of a medium size sedan finite element model for off-set car-to-car impacts. This model was originally developed for front impact and does not include side structure compliance. Two tests conducted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are used for evaluation of the simulations. The overall results indicate that the simulations appear to be consistent with the crash test data. Problems associated with the use of node constraints, lack of side structure model fidelity, and the different integration time marching are identified and solutions for the problems are proposed.

This paper reports on the status of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) research program on Improved Frontal Protection. The program is in the problem determination phase. Accident analysis is being conducted to predict the injury producing crash environment for occupants with air bags, to determine appropriate test conditions, dummy sizes and injury measures, and to predict potential benefits. The interim findings are reported here; however the more complete analysis will be in a subsequent Problem Determination report to the agency. Collinear and oblique, frontal, offset crash testing, at different widths of overlap, has been conducted with a standard “bullet” car into several current model “target” cars at speeds of about 60 to 65 kmph for each car. Dummy injury measurements and structural responses provide a basis for determining the most severe impact environment. At present, the Hybrid III with additional instrumentation is the surrogate of choice.

This paper presents information on analytical procedures being developed to characterize a “baseline” vehicle fleet in frontal crashes. A newly developed analytical model is being implemented for this characterization. The Passenger/Driver Simulation model (PADS) can simulate unrestrained and restrained driver and passenger occupants in frontal crashes. The “baseline” characterization started with the selection of representative passenger car make/model groupings. Each grouping has similar structural and interior characteristics. The PADS model is being run in an automated mode simulating these vehicles in different frontal crash configurations. The output of the PADS runs includes measures of injury severity and the cause of the injury. The PADS output obtained in these automated runs will be compared to field accident data. Since the analytical procedures and tools are still being refined, this paper focuses on the methodology and its implementation rather than the results.

This paper presents information on analytical procedures being developed by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to assess the safety problem associated with occupants of passenger cars involved in frontal impacts. This analytical assessment started with the characterization of a baseline vehicle fleet consisting of specific make/model passenger car groupings representative of the in-use fleet in the United States. Newly developed analytical models have been developed and are being run in an automated mode simulating these vehicles in different frontal crash configurations. The output of these automated runs includes measures of injury severity and cause of injury, and is being used to identify the effect of different vehicle attributes on injury causation. Preliminary analytical results are presented on the relationship between steering assembly structural attributes and injury severity.

This paper presents some current methods of evaluating vehicle aggressivity. Current methods under development include the use of a honeycomb front impact barrier which measures loads across the vehicle frontal area. Analytical methods are also available to model a combination of vehicles in frontal collisions and the associated occupant responses. In addition, a theoretical method is presented to measure aggressivity. The new methodology also uses a deformable barrier in frontal impact testing. This barrier, however, is modeled to represent a non-aggressive vehicle, used as a standard against which aggressivity characteristics of all cars can be measured.