Design, analysis and experimental study of a novel side thorax impactor to be used in pedestrian protection tests for flat front vehicles

Download

Index.pdf

Date

2021-10

Author

Saraç Karadeniz, Sevgi

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

464
views

471
downloads

Pedestrian protection is crucial and the vehicle manufacturers put more and more effort to make vehicles safer for pedestrians in case of pedestrian involved accidents. Injuries and fatalities are very frequent and severe in pedestrian involved accidents because the pedestrians are much more vulnerable when compared to the vehicle occupants as they do not have any protection like airbags or seatbelts. The current pedestrian protection regulations focus on the tests of bonnet type passenger cars for the head, upper leg and lower leg regions that are performed by using the headform and legform impactors. However, no tests are defined to evaluate thorax injuries. The number of flat front vehicles is increasing within the cities. Additionally, the number of Sports Utility Vehicles (SUVs) and Light Truck Vehicles (LTVs) which are bonnet type vehicles but with relatively high bonnets and bumpers is increasing. Thorax impacts and thorax injuries are more frequently encountered in pedestrian involved accidents with these types of vehicles. Furthermore, thorax region injuries become almost as severe as head injuries for especially flat front vehicles. In this study, a novel patentable thorax impactor has been designed to evaluate thorax injuries in pedestrian involved accidents. The design has been firstly validated with Finite Element Analysis (FEA). Prototype of the thorax impactor has been manufactured and physical pendulum tests have been performed for the biofidelity validation. The test results have shown that ThImp-PED has an acceptable biofidelity. A novel pedestrian protection test procedure for thorax impact with for flat-front vehicles has been proposed. Pedestrian tests have been performed with the Linear Impactor Test System by using the novel thorax impactor and the proposed test procedure. The pedestrian test results have shown that the thorax impactor can be used as the impactor in pedestrian protection tests to evaluate the vehicle’s performance in pedestrian safety in terms of the thorax injury criterion. A patentable design of the pedestrian thorax impactor has been achieved.

Subject Keywords

Vehicle safety, Pedestrian protection, Pedestrian protection tests, Thorax impactor, Test regulations, Flat front vehicles, Finite element analysis

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/94569

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Evaluation of pedestrian safety around bus stops using geographic information systems Yüksekol, İrem; Tüydeş Yaman, Hediye; Department of Civil Engineering (2012) Pedestrians are the most vulnerable road users in terms of traffic safety. Public transit users mostly have a pedestrian trip before and/or after the transit one. Thus, pedestrian activity is produced at transit stops naturally. The main focus of this study is pedestrian safety problems around transit stops, more specifically bus stops. The proposed methodology first includes Geographic Information Systems (GIS) analyses of the pedestrian safety along the study corridors and around bus stops on them; this e...
Pedestrian violations: Reasoned or social reactive? Comparing theory of planned behavior and prototype willingness model DEMİR, BAŞAR; Özkan, Türker; Demir, Sila (2019-01-01) Pedestrians hold high responsibility in accidents because of their unsafe traffic behaviors. Pedestrian violations are an important traffic safety problem, especially in low and middle-income countries. The problem would be better understood and solved by theory-based research on pedestrian violations. The theory of planned behavior (TPB) and the prototype willingness model (PWM) are two leading decision-making frameworks that are applied to a wide range of behaviors. These theories address the reasoned and...
Experimental and numerical investigation of comparability of whiplash sled test results ÖZDEMİR, MUSTAFA; İDER, SITKI KEMAL; Gökler, Mustafa İlhan (2016-02-01) Whiplash-associated neck injuries represent an important health and socioeconomic problem attracting more and more attention of the vehicle safety community. Sled tests are conducted for the dynamic whiplash assessment of seats. However, reproducibility of the initial backset distances and of the sled pulses in every test plays an important role on the comparability of these results. In this study, in order to investigate these aspects, three different driver seat types are considered with three identical a...
Lane change scheduling for connected and autonomous vehicles Atagoziev, Maksat; Güran Schmidt, Ece; Schmidt, Klaus Verner (2023-02-01) The execution of lane changes has a strong impact on driving safety and traffic throughput. Therefore, it is highly desired to automate and coordinate lane changes. The subject of this paper is the scheduling of lane changes of a group of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) with the aim of minimizing the time during which all lane changes are completed, while keeping small inter-vehicle distances. To this end, the paper first develops an algorithm for minimizing the lane change time of a single CAV. Th...
An approach to investigate relationship between speed and safety on urban arterials Ardiç Eminağa, Zerrin; Akyılmaz, M. Özdemir; Department of Civil Engineering (2008) Traffic safety is an important problem in today’s world with increasing number of fatalities and injuries in traffic accidents. For the solution of this problem, determination of accident prone locations on a network and reasons behind is an essential step, which is studied to some extend via different traffic accident analyses in the literature. While major factors affecting accident risk, such as speed, congestion, infrastructural aspects are known, it is still very difficult to figure out the interaction...

Citation Formats

S. Saraç Karadeniz, “Design, analysis and experimental study of a novel side thorax impactor to be used in pedestrian protection tests for flat front vehicles,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2021.