Abstract
Pedestrian safety is one of the most discussed topics in vehicle safety right now. There are concerns regarding the realistic implementation of real world accident issues into the EEVC WG17 component testing procedure. The car industry presented a modified component test in connection with the self commitment. The key advantages of the current test procedure are ease of handling and high reproducibility. They are contrasted by a number of specific problems which the current component test can not properly address. For example it can not reproduce the effect of the shape of the car's front on the kinematics of a colliding pedestrian. But the contact points of a pedestrian on a cars front are car-specific. Therefore it is advisable not to use schematically pre-determined test zones as a basis for real life improvements. For the determination of car-specific test-zones numerical simulations can be used.
The presented approach for a test procedure combines numerical simulations and component tests into a "Hybrid-Test". The numerical simulation allows to define the car-specific parameters of the pedestrian-car-collision in terms of localisation of the contact, impact angel and velocity of the relevant pedestrian body parts. Starting with a description of the pedestrian-car-collision a suitable numerical model has been created. MBS-dummies are made to collide with passenger cars under a multitude of conditions (size of the pedestrian, relative location of car and pedestrian, relative speed).The TNO-pedestrian model has been chosen. Its suitability to represent the kinematics properly is evaluated. The procedure has been applied to two very distinct car models. As a result a statistical pattern describing the impact of pedestrians in a collision is generated for both. It is shown that the results are considerably at variance to the testing conditions according to EEVC WG17. In a second step these parameters can be used as input for an experimental component test.
The results of the numerical simulation are used to identify the most dangerous areas and features of the regarded vehicle. This method can already be used in the very early stages of car development to improve the preconditions for pedestrian safety in terms of the geometrical attributes of the front which define the kinematics of the pedestrian impact. In a second step it is possible to define requirements for package and body design. As a result much better real life performance at relatively low cost is expected. The method can be applied to all current and future car concepts (SUV, minivans, cross over concepts etc. ) very easily.