Design and assessing of Motorcyclist Vehicle Restraint Systems: numerical simulation and parametric study

1st International Conference of Impact Loading of Materials and Structures (ICILSM), TURIN, ITALIE, 22-/05/2016 - 26/05/2016Motorcyclists' collisions with roadside barriers accident have a high rate of mortality throughout the world. On the European level, there are no standards for assessing the performance of motorcyclist vehicle restraint systems. Two procedures are adopted by most of EU countries: LIER procedure and normative procedure TS1317-8. Both recommend similar conditions of barriers performance testing. In this paper, the test conditions of the two procedures have been assessed by a virtual testing method developed under the explicit finite element code LS DYNA. The main objective of this work is to make propositions about a reference test conditions of which can lead to a future European Standard for the assessment of motorcyclist vehicle restraint systems performance. Then, a full factorial design of experiments (DOE) was used to analyse the impact configurations, the impact point, the impact height, the impact velocity and impact angle influences on motorcycle roadside barrier performance. The DOE variables responses are head, neck and thorax injury index measured on Hybrid III 50th percentile dummy for lateral impact configurations. According to injury index, critical scenarios of motorcyclists' impacts against the infrastructure have been analysed