Currently, belt restraint systems are among the most effective occupant protection devices now available and mandatory usage laws are spreading among the world's nations. Accordingly, the belt usage ratio is also increasing annually. Following the implementation of the FMVSS 208 Passive Restraint Regulation in the United States, a diversity of belt restraint systems has come to be offered on the automotive market. This implies that an increasing number of belt-restrained occupants may be involved in side impact traffic accidents in the future. Considering such a situation, in this paper, we focused attention on occupant head behavior in a side impact crash, and investigated the effects of several belt restraint systems on occupant head behavior and impact protection performance in side impact crashes. For this purpose, we conducted 10 full-scale side impact crash tests according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) test procedure using one model of a Honda subcompact car. In half of these test cars, two '88 improved-type Side Impact Dummies (SID) were placed one behind the other on the near-side. In the other half, two SID's were placed side by side in the front seats. Five different restraint conditions were tested in both seating configurations, i.e., lap belts only, 2 point automatic shoulder belts (2P/A), 3 point automatic belts (3P/A), 3 point manual belts (3P/M) and no-restraints. Based on these test results, we compared and analyzed whether SID head behavior and SID torso region accelerations were affected by differences of condition such as occupant restraints, seating positions and presence of a side occupant, and discussed the effectiveness of the belt restraint systems tested on side impact occupant protection. (A) For the covering abstract of the conference, see IRRD 837684.
Samenvatting