Abstract
Nowadays, in the current vehicle development pedestrian protection is a very important topic. In Europe, a specific regulation aimed to decrease the damage to head, pelvis, and leg of pedestrian impacted by cars was adopted. It has imposed changes in the vehicles front design. In particular the bonnet is a part interested by these changes, being the more involved car body component in the impact with the pedestrian. In particular the bonnet is studied for the impact against the head of pedestrian. Usually the injuries to the head are evaluated with impact tests where a specific headform is launched on the bonnet: the acceleration signal in the centre of gravity is elaborated to obtain the HIC parameter. However, the present approach based on the HIC value only is reported to be largely unsatisfactory. In this work a lightweight design for a bonnet of a medium/large car is proposed, first by means of virtual simulations, then a new experimental methodology for the measurement of the rotational acceleration of the pedestrian head has been developed. The experimental results are reported .and discussed in the work.
Keywords: Pedestrian protection, lightweight design, triaxial rotational acceleration, head injuries evaluation