Despite of recent progresses in occupant safety, the protection of children is still not optimal. To offer a better understanding of child injury mechanisms, the present study proposes a human-like finite element (FE) model of a three-year-old child's neck. If model validation against scaled experiments involving adults is still under discussion it is today the only way to perform a validation of a child model. The developed neck FE model has been driven with dummy responses coming from experimental real world accident reconstruction using the Q3 dummy in the framework of the EU T-CHILD. A number of intra-cervical parameters have been computed and best correlation with the occurrence of injury was found to be the force transmitted to the odontoid. For the covering abstract see ITRD E141762.
Samenvatting