Abstract
Research and/or Engineering Questions/Objective
Side impacts were the most frequent and fatal traffic accidents in Korea. Even though the safety regulation and KNCAP(MDB and Pole side test) for side impact protections have been started in 2003, the fatality from side impact accidents could not been improved as expected. Especially all the KNCAP tested vehicles achieved perfect head protection scores. But, the head injury is the main cause of fatality in the real traffic accidents. From the limited KIDAS(Korea In-Depth Accident Study) data, the number of accident and injury severity between near and far side impact were almost equivalent. The objective of this study was to investigate the severity of far side impacts in KIDAS and proposing test methods for the far side occupant protections.
Methodology
Recently, KIDAS has been established and collected the accident data from four different medium size cities from 2012. Among 2,080 cases of all accidents, 217 cases of side impacts were investigated. In this data analysis, seated position, vehicle damage, impact speed, impact direction, vehicle type, gender, age, height and weight were selected as influence variables to identify the severity of injury and injured body parts. On the basis of the most frequent accident types, the computer simulation model for both vehicle kinematics and occupant injury for near and far side impacts have been developed to compare with the full scale crash tests.
Results
In the paper, the test results for injury severity for near and far side occupants will be compared as well as the kinematic behavior of dummy motions. The correlated simulation results for the different dummy models (ES-2 and WorldSID) will be presented The injury severity and dummy behaviors for the different gender (male vs female) will be examined to propose the protection for far side occupants in KNCAP near future. In the simulation, MDB impact and pole side impact test will be conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of far side protection. Also, the center air bag will be developed to prevent interaction between driver and front passengers if interaction creates sever injury. The main finding will be the proposed far side impact protection test method and effectiveness of the center air bag system. New assessment criteria for far side occupant in side impacts will be presented.
Limitations of this study
An important limitation of the current study is the limited full scale test number to distinguish the severity of far side compared with near side. Furthermore, the current KIDAS data set is still small and may not fully represent the nation traffic accidents.
What does the paper offer that is new in the field including in comparison to other work by the authors?
The analysis and comparison from KIDAS for near and far side impacts in this paper is new as well the effectiveness comparison results from center air bag to prevent interaction between driver and front passenger.
Conclusions The test methods for the protection for occupant from the far side impact have been examined and developed. These proposed test method and assessment criteria can be adopted in next KNCAP roadmap.
Key Words : Far side impact; KNCAP; KIDAS