Head injuries are the most frequent and most costly of all severe injuries to occupants of motor vehicles, and the upper interior structure of the vehicle is the largest cause of head injury. To reduce the violence of head impacts during crashes, sun visors are required to be covered or constructed with energy-absorbing materials, but current regulations do not provide a method for evaluating these materials. This paper describes a test method for evaluating the head protective padding in sun visors. The head of a Hybrid III dummy is impacted against the sun visor and the resulting HIC is used to measure head injury potential. Preliminary test results of 20 sun visors from 1991 model cars show a wide variation in the HIC readings measured by the dummy head.
Samenvatting