The Research On Driver Lower Extremity Dynamic Response And Injury Prevention In The Car Frontal Impact

Over the past several years, the use of advanced safety belt and airbags systems in passenger cars had led to a reduction of severe driver head and chest injuries. Attention has therefore become more focused on lower extremity injuries. These are not necessarily life threatening, but very often cause considerable pain and frequently require long-term treatment and rehabilitation and they can even result in permanent disability.To reduce risk of driver lower extremity injury in frontal impact, on the basis of literature studying about the well-adopted research method and fundamental theory, the paper summarized the experience and results obtained in the field of driver lower extremity injury research. The mechanism of lower extremity injury is a very complex problem and many problems still need to be studied about it. Human lower extremity anatomy structure was introduced in this paper, the mechanism of driver lower extremity injury during a frontal impact was discussed and categorized, and injury criteria and their basis were reviewed.By means of dynamic simulation of multi-body and finite element methods, the influence of the footwell design parameters to lower extremity injuries of the driver in passenger car frontal impacts was studied. The simulation result showed that: Variety of impact acceleration field has great influence on lower extremity injuries;Using safety belt has prominent efficiency to reduce lower extremity injuries;using knee bolster with lower stiffness can reduce the loads to femur, knee and tibia;The right foot placed on the brake pedal will increase the risk of foot injury evidently;Variety of footwell intrusion induced by impact deform of car forepart will influence lower extremity injuries severity to a certain degree.Countermeasures to reduce the risk of lower extremity injury were studied, including installation of knee airbag and foot airbag and some other ways. These countermeasures show prominent protection efficiency on reduction of driver lower extremity.Method of this paper is mainly simulation, through which parameter study was carried out and effective countermeasures were put forward. Results of this research...