Roadside safety devices are designed to protect vehicle occupants from injuries. As the purpose of roadside safety hardware is to be functional while minimizing the risk of occupant injury, the occupant risk criteria are vital to the assessment of these devices. The Manual for Assessing Safety Hardware (MASH) specifies guidelines for crash tests and gives evaluation criteria for safety devices. Per MASH, the risk of injury to the occupant is assessed based on the concept of flail space model. The occupant impact velocity and occupant ridedown acceleration are used for assessing the injury criteria of an occupant. It is assumed that the model is an unrestrained point mass that can move as a free missile. There is growing use of restraints such as seatbelts and airbags. Hence, attempts are made in this study to assess real-world occupant injury risk associated with current MASH criteria using crash tests performed with instrumented anthropomorphic test devices (ATDs) and comparing them with injury criteria provided by U.S. New Car Assessment Program (US NCAP) regulations. Finite element models for a passenger car, passive restraint systems (seatbelt and airbags), and ATDs were calibrated against a full-scale frontal crash test. The crash test was conducted with a passenger car impacting a rigid wall at a 90-degree angle and with 35 mph impact speed. The vehicle was instrumented according to MASH requirements, and an instrumented ATD was included as required by US-NCAP standards. The full-scale crash test was designed to replicate to the maximum extent possible testing criteria from MASH and US-NCAP testing standards. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting