Abstract
In order to minimize occupant injury in a vehicle crash, an approach was attempted to address this issue by making the wave form of vehicle body deceleration (deceleration curve) optimal to lower the maximum deceleration value applied to the occupant. A study with a one-dimensional two-mass model was conducted to the kinetic mechanism between the body deceleration curve and the responding occupants motion while finding a mathematical solution for the optimal body deceleration curve. A common feature of the derived mathematical solutions is that they consist of three aspects: high deceleration, low or negative deceleration, and constant deceleration. This was demonstrated by simulation with a three-dimensional dummy. The results show that the response of the dummy closely agrees with that of the one-dimensional two-mass model, thus proving the adequacy of the mathematical solution, and that occupant injury was reduced. A type of new body construction is proposed to generate the optimal body deceleration curve obtained from this research.