This paper sets forth the needs of an advanced instrumented neck for the NHTSA advanced frontal dummy, which is intended to duplicate the response of a human neck during dynamic impact in the fore and aft and lateral directions. Previous efforts to develop a suitable biofidelic mechanical neck for human surrogates are briefly discussed in order to outline their limitations in the dynamic impact environment. Human response of the head/neck system under various dynamic impact conditions, to which the new neck simulation system was designed, are presented and the goals of the development effort outlined. The evolution of the new biofidelic neck design is presented and the final neck design that has been incorporated into the advanced ATD is discussed in detail. A series of evaluation tests of the neck response under various dynamic impact loadings were conducted to evaluate the success of the dummy head/neck response in duplicating the responses obtained from the volunteer tests. The results of these evaluation tests are presented and discussed. (A)
Samenvatting