Understanding Boundary Conditions for Brain Injury Prediction : Finite Element Analysis of Vulnerable Road Users

Vulnerable road users (VRUs) are overrepresented in the statistics on severe and deadly injuries in traffic accidents, most commonly involving the head. The finite element (FE) method presents the possibility to model complex interactions between the human body and vehicles in order to better understand the injury mechanisms. While the rapid development of computer capacity has allowed for increasingly detailed FE-models, there is always a benefit of reducing the studied problem. Due to its material properties, the brain is more sensitive to rotational motion than to purely linear, resulting in complex injury causation. When studying brain injuries caused by a direct impact to the head, simulations using an isolated head model significantly increases efficiency compared to using a complete human body model. Also evaluation of head protective systems uses isolated mechanical head representations. It is not, however, established the extent to which the boundary conditions of the head determine the outcome of brain injuries. FE models of both the entire human body and the isolated head were used in this thesis to study the effect of the body, as well as active neck muscle tension, on brain injury outcome in VRU accidents. A pediatric neck model was also developed to enable the study of age-specific effects. A vehicle windscreen model was developed to evaluate the necessity of capturing the failure deformation during pedestrian head impacts. It was shown that the influence of the neck and body on brain injury prediction is greater in longer duration impacts, such as pedestrian head-to-windscreen impacts with an average difference of 21%. In accidents with shorter duration impacts, such as head-to-ground bicycle accidents, the average influence was between 3-12%. The influence did not consistently increase or limit the severity, and was dependent on the degree of rotation induced by the impact, as well as the mode of deformation induced in the neck. It was also shown that the predicted brain injury severity is dependent on capturing the large deformations of fractured windscreen, with the greatest effect near the windscreen frame. The pediatric neck model showed a large effect of age-dependent anatomical changes on inertial head loading, making it a promising tool to study the age-dependent effects in VRU accidents.QC 20171013