Three Years Old Child Head-Neck Finite Element Modeling -Simulation of the Interaction with Airbag in Frontal and Side Impact.

This study proposes to assess the interaction between the 3 years old child Head-Neck system and a typical airbag, a protective system frequently used in the automotive field. Two separated models (Head and Neck) developed at the Strasbourg University (UDS) were coupled in order to estimate theinjury risk during this type of impact. The first model developed is a three years old child Finite Element neck Model (FEM) based on a realistic geometry (Meyer et al. 2008). This FEM was validated in four directions against an original method based on scaling method (Irwin et al. 1997). The second FEM is a 3 years old Head FE model published by Roth et al. in 2008.This model proposed an injury criterion in terms of Von Mises stress in the brain for moderate neurological injuries. After a coupling of these twoFE models two impacts a frontal and lateral impact configuration is simulated. These impacts consisted of an airbag deployment at different gaps inorder to calculate and estimate child brain injury risks. The full text of this paper may be found at: http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/esv/esv21/09-0392.pdf For the covering abstract see ITRD E145407.