Rider Stature Influence to Injury Risk in Motorcycle Rear Impact to Car 2019-01-1436

Road traffic accidents cause one of the highest numbers of severe injuries. Approximately 1.25 million people die each year as a result of road traffic crashes and between 20 and 50 million more people suffer non-fatal injuries, with many incurring a disability. Nearly half of those dying on the roads are so-called vulnerable road users, namely pedestrians, cyclists and two-wheeler riders including motorcyclists. Those vulnerable road users usually undergo complex kinematics and complex loading caused by the other vehicle impact.

Virtual human body biomechanical models play an important role to assess the injuries during the impact loading especially for scenarios, where complex dynamical loading is taken into account. An additional benefit of some virtual human models is their scalability, so that they can assess the injury risk for the particular subject taking into account a wide spectrum of the whole population.

The presented work shows the motorcycle rider injury risk analysis during the rear motorcycle accident to the car using the virtual approach by the numerical simulation taking into account the variability of the human body. The main aim of the work is to show the injury risk for a varying anthropometry of the motorcycle rider, when a rear impact occurs. Several virtual human body models based on the population variability are concerned. Each virtual human body model is scaled automatically by the previously developed scaling algorithm, coupled to personal protective equipment and sit on the motorcycle. The rear impact to a car is assessed by the numerical simulation. The sensitivity study is processed by evaluating the anthropometry dependent injury risk assessment for the rear impact scenario.

The paper contributes to the field of vehicle safety technology by the virtual approach for the assessing the anthropometry dependent injury risk using scalable virtual biomechanical human body models. The personal protective equipment optimization and the injury risk mitigation is consequent result considering the motorcycle impact to the rear end of the car.