A Research And Improvement Of The Automobile Head Restraint In Whiplash

Nowadays safety has been a greatly important area in automobiles'design and manufactory. Read-end collisions are the most commonly in traffic accidents. Mostly the collisions result in passengers'neck injuries. The neck injuries in low-speed rear-end collisions cause long pain in neck, which cost enormous money. Therefore, improving the capacity protecting from the whiplash injury is meaningful for the economy and the society.The aim of the paper is to improve the capacity of a native vehicle, which protects from whiplash injury.The paper can forecast the movement process of the seat and dummy in a rear-end collision, using the CAE analysis techonology. Built a finite element model of the seat and couple with the BioRIDâ…¡dummy to construct a rear-end collision system to analysis the capacity protecting from neck injury of the seat. Without changing the seat frame, alter the material of the headrest foam, and will improve the performance in rear-end collision.To further improvement, the paper designs a active headrest. To compare common ones, the active headrest does not only move forwards to reduce cut down the distance between head and headrest, but also use principal and subordinate headrests. When generally driving, the subordinate headrest is folded. Once rear-end collisions happened, the subordinate one will unfold, composing a larger headrest with the principal one. This way enlarge the contacting surface with the passenger'head to meet the needs of all kinds of people. The design invents a pure mechanical structure and an electromechanical reversible one. The pure mechanical structure concludes assembles of headrest, trigger mechanism and connecting mechanism. And the electromechanical one also need an electric motor and senors, with a completely control strategy.What's more, a CATIA model is built to simulate the motion of the active headrest. Finally, the finite element of the active headrest was put into the rear-end collision simulating system to verify the validity. The result indicates the improvements can save the passenger's neck injury by approximately 55%. So the device plays a good protection of passengers'neck. The improvements can enhance the capacity protecting from whiplash injuries effectively.