Research On Child Injury Mechanism And Pretection For Child Under Generalized Side Impact

Accident statistics show that the AIS2+ injury risk to child suffering from side impacts are the highest rate in vehicle accidents. Since a lack of in-depth study of child injury mechanisms, there is still no internationally recognized injury criteria for child in side impact. Besides, the current study on child restraint systems is only aiming at single impact direction or single sitting posture. This paper conducted a series of studies on child injury mechanism and protection for child under various impact directions and sitting postures. The details and key conclusions are described as follows:1 ? The paper provides a detailed review of the experimental data and experimental methods available in the literature for the structure responses and material properties of different body regions of children, including head, neck, thorax, abdomen, extremities and pelvis. The sled tests of pediatric cadavers and volunteers are also reviewed. Current state-of-art is analyzed and future studies are suggested. Lastly, impact tests on head and thorax of several child cadavers were conducted.2?The FE-MB model of built-in child seat was built and solved by coupling MADYMO with LS-DYNA. The method of sled test for child seat in side impact was developed, and the model was then validated by comparing wit h sled test data. Results showed that the model has enough precision and can be used for lateral studying.3?The child seat was modified in order to reduce risk of choking. It could reduce the neck injury effectively by adding the side wings. The effect of principal direction of force(PDOF) on injury parameters of head and neck was then analyzed based on the modified model. It was shown that all the injury response values were significantly positively correlated with PDOF. Injury risks of child with various sitting postures were studied according to traffic statistics. It could be found that child had greater head injury risk when severely tilt; neck injury and choke risk when played electronic games and under braking; thorax and head injury risk when tilt outboard; pelvis injury when tilt inboard.4?Multiobjective optimization for child under different PDOFs was investigated by adopting a weight factor technique. Results showed that the developed method could effectively reduce head and neck injuries for child under generalized side impact. The conclusions from this research provide valuable information for future designs of intelligent child restraint systems.