Pressure Measurements on Spatially Curved Elastic Surfaces during Crash Tests

Abstract

One of the aspects in designing interior equipment in passenger vehicles is to minimize the risk of injuries. Among others this HEAD INJURY CRITERION (HIC) was developed for evaluation and comparison of variants as well as for establishment of a basis for legislation. The HEAD INJURY CRITERION is a combined evaluation factor which includes the acceleration on the inside of a dummy head as a primary characteristic. As described in (1) this factor does not satisfactorily describe the actual risk of injury. This becomes obvious when local rigidity variations and maxima indicate a considerable risk of skull fracture, while the measurement of the acceleration with its integrating effect shows comparatively low values simultaneously. To date, a better measuring procedure is not available, so that this method still represents the state of the art. The purpose of this paper is to present a method, using the well known pressure foil procedure for measuring the pressure to which the dummies are subjected in crash tests, in order to obtain information on the injury risk presented by interior equipment in passengers cars as well as information on the effect of protective systems.