Pedestrian headform testing is used to measure the relative safety of structures that may cause head injury to a pedestrian in the event of a collision. Examples of this testing include the Australasian New Car Assessment Program (ANCAP), the new Global Technical Regulation (GTR) on pedestrian safety, and AS 4876.1 on bull bars. In these tests, the Head Injury Criterion (HIC) is used to measure the risk of head injury in a given impact. For each of these test protocols, choices were made regarding the conditions of the test, and the HIC required in order to pass the test. These choices have implications, in that they may be expected to guide the development of structures designed to meet that test criteria. This report examines the differences in test outcomes that can be expected for test protocols which specify more relaxed criteria than others. A speed distribution obtained from in-depth crash investigation was used derive the distribution of HIC values across real crash speeds, for structures that meet different test criteria. The results indicate that what may seem like relative small changes in test conditions and acceptable HIC levels may result in significant changes in HIC, and the proportion of real crash speeds that a given structure could be considered safe for. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting