DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION OF EEVC WG17 LOWER LEGFORM FE MODEL FOR PEDESTRIAN SAFETY

Vehicle-pedestrian collisions had claimed the lives of many in the world roads yearly. Among the types of injury that may occur in a vehicle-pedestrian collision, lower extremity injuries have the highest account. These alarming statistic has encouraged joining effort from researchers, car manufacturers and the government to find solutions in reducing the risk of vulnerable road users. The car bumper structure design plays a crucial role in cushioning the impact on the pedestrian leg during a collision. The European Enhanced Vehicle-Safety Committee (EEVC) has developed test methods to evaluate severity of the lower leg injury, upper leg injury and head impact injury in a vehicle-pedestrian simulated collision. Since lower extremity injury are most common, undivided attention should be paid on the lower legform to bumper test. The maximum bending angle, maximum shearing displacement and maximum tibia acceleration are among the three injury criterion determined for lower legform to bumper test. Before the lower legform to bumper test can be perform the lower legform has to be certified statically and dynamically. The advancement of computerization had supported the usage of Finite Element Method(FEM) in simulating real life scenarios for analysis. Irregular geometries are now discretized and solved numerically. Finite Element Analysis(FEA) has proven to reduce time and cost significantly therefore the author took advantaged of this tool and simulated a lower legform to bumper collision. This paper presents in detail the static and dynamic certification of the Finite Element (FE) legform model using the HyperWorks software. The static results for both bending and shearing has to be within the EEVC/WG17 limits and the internal energy at 15º shall be 100±7J