Study On Driver Neck Injury In Rear Crash Under Car To Car Collision

With the rapid development of our social economy, there is an active demand of buying cars among people, and it shows a trend of great growth of car ownership. The increase of cars and drivers facilitates people’s lives, but brings a severe potential safety hazard and a series of social problems such as a lack of energy and air pollution. In all kinds of frequent traffic accidents, the rear-end impact owns a high incidence and the disability rate reaches 53.2%. The whiplash injury caused by collision s would result in a great pain suffered by patient s and a huge loss of social economy. Currently, the driver neck injury research during the rear-end impact is mainly based on the sled whiplash tests, there is less study on neck injury of car to car rear-end impact.In order to explore the injury risk of occupants during the actual rear-end impact, this study focused on the analysis and compare of driver injury characteristics between the whiplash tests and car to car rear-end impacts, and conducted parameter optimizations of a variety of conditions. The main content of this dissertation are shown as following:1、Two vehicle finite element models, Ford Explorer and Ford Taurus, were used to simulate actual car to car full rear-end impact of different speed conditions. The driver restraint system model of Ford Taurus was built to analyze the occupant neck injury risk with the considering of whiplash tests.2、The comprehensive injury index WIC of rear-end impact was defined as the optimization target, and conducted multi-objective parameter optimizations of driver restraint system in the conditions of whiplash test and three different rear-end impacts, which could reduce the neck injury risk of occupants effectively.3、The score of output damage criteria of four rear-end impact conditions were marked based on the scoring criterion of Version 2015 C-NCAP whiplash test, and selected the parameter range of headrest which could achieve the optimization target of various collision conditions.It is indicated that vertical direction acceleration will worsen the driver neck injuries during actual car to car rear-end impact, especially under the low-speed condition. Therefore, it is necessary to take it into account in the study of low-speed rear-end impact in the future. Moreover, the degree of the effect will differ with types and collision speeds of two vehicles. The parame ter optimizations of driver restraint system in various collision conditions were conducted, and the optimal results were selected based on the scoring criterion of Version 2015 C-NCAP whiplash test. The final headrest parameter ranges were obtained to satisfy four conditions of rear-end impact. This can provide references for the parameter design of active headrest.