Research On Driver Compartment Package With Consideration Of Both Postural Comfort And Frontal Crash Safety

In car design, driver comfort is one of the target for car factories. But with the increaseof car ownership in China, traffic accidents also increase greatly year by year, and theinjuries caused by traffic accidents increase accordingly, which cause great harm toindividuals and families. So how to guarantee the driver comfort by reducing or avoidingvehicle frontal crash injury of occupants (especially the driver side occupants) is theimportant topic at the beginning of each car development.In vehicle design process, especially in the product feasibility analysis phase (orplatform planning stage) before styling, driver comfort and safety performance will beconsidered comprehensively, so as to determine the requirements of driver comfort andpassive safety targets. Based on these targets, sub-targets of comfort including comfortscores of back, shoulder, leg, arm and torso will be determined further, as well as sub-safetytargets of injury of head, thorax, abdomen, neck, thigh and leg, which relate with manydefinition of Hard Points. In these process, some of these targets will conflict with each other,which means sometimes more comfort cause less safety. So, it is important to makereasonable judgment of selection of comfort and safety.In this paper, the relationship of driver’s comfort and safety parameters was studied asto typical car packaging parameters of the seat cushion angle A27, the seat back angle A40and the distance between steering wheel and driver. Firstly, the influences of each abovepackaging factors on seating comfort and safety were analyzed separately. Secondly, theco-influences of these parameters on comfort and safety were studied based on theexperiment scheme. Based on these results, the design was optimized, with results of designwhich meets good comfort and safety requirements of driver.