How to quantitatively evaluate safety of driver behavior upon accident? A biomechanical methodology

PLoS One. 2017 Dec 14;12(12):e0189455. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0189455. eCollection 2017.

Abstract

How to evaluate driver spontaneous reactions in various collision patterns in a quantitative way is one of the most important topics in vehicle safety. Firstly, this paper constructs representative numerical crash scenarios described by impact velocity, impact angle and contact position based on finite element (FE) computation platform. Secondly, a driver cabin model is extracted and described in the well validated multi-rigid body (MB) model to compute the value of weighted injury criterion to quantitatively assess drivers' overall injury under certain circumstances. Furthermore, based on the coupling of FE and MB, parametric studies on various crash scenarios are conducted. It is revealed that the WIC (Weighted Injury Criteria) value variation law under high impact velocities is quite distinct comparing with the one in low impact velocities. In addition, the coupling effect can be elucidated by the fact that the difference of WIC value among three impact velocities under smaller impact angles tends to be distinctly higher than that under larger impact angles. Meanwhile, high impact velocity also increases the sensitivity of WIC under different collision positions and impact angles. Results may provide a new methodology to quantitatively evaluate driving behaviors and serve as a significant guiding step towards collision avoidance for autonomous driving vehicles.

MeSH terms

  • Accidents, Traffic*
  • Automobile Driving*
  • Biomechanical Phenomena*
  • Humans
  • Protective Devices
  • Safety*
  • Wounds and Injuries

Grants and funding

This work is financially supported by Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, Beihang University and start-up funds of ‘‘The Recruitment Program of Global Experts” awardee (YWF-16-RSC-011), Beihang University. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.