Automotive seats are tested for compliance with federal motor vehicle safety standards (FMVSS) to assure safety during impact. Many wheelchair users rely upon their wheelchairs to serve as vehicle seats. However, the crashworthiness of these wheelchairs during impact is often unknown. This study evaluated the crashworthiness of five combinations of wheelchair back support surfaces and attachmen...

Ambulance vehicles are a unique passenger environment with complex crashworthiness and occupant protection issues, eg. occupants in various orientations, unique human factors aspects and an array of aftermarket interior modifications. In the USA, ambulance vehicle occupant protection, crashworthiness and safety testing lags 30 years behind current general automotive safety technology. This pape...

Safer Vehicles is a cornerstone of the Safe Systems approach to road safety. The Australasian New Car Assessment Program is one of the premier programs under the safer vehicles banner. It aims to improve the safety of new vehicles entering the fleet through identifying objective design and performance criteria for manufacturers to improve vehicle safety and publishing information on the relativ...

NOTICE This document is disseminated under the sponsorship of the Department of Transportation in the interest of information exchange. The United States Government assumes no liability for its contents or use thereof. NOTICE The United States Government does not endorse products or manufacturers. Trade or manufacturers' names appear herein solely because they are considered essential to the ob...

Crashworthiness can be defined as the ability of an aircraft and its internal systems to protect occupants from injury in the event of a crash. In general, injury in aircraft crashes can be considered to arise from three distinct sources: (1) excessive acceleration forces; (2) direct trauma from contact with injurious surfaces, and; (3) exposure to environmental factors such as fire, smoke, wat...

Previous research [1] using an advanced multi-domain topology optimization technique has shown a great promise for the crashworthiness design using the new technique. In this paper, we try to answer some fundamental questions regarding the crashworthiness design, which include: 1) what are the fundamental crash mechanisms of a general crash process; 2) how the uncertainties in the system will a...

OBJECTIVES In the year 2000, as part of the process for setting New Zealand road safety targets, a projection was made for a reduction in social cost of 15.5 percent associated with improvements in crashworthiness, which is a measure of the occupant protection of the light passenger vehicle fleet. Since that document was produced, new estimates of crashworthiness have become available, allowing...

In this paper the optimal model of thin-walled sections of automotive body for structural crashworthiness is built. With computer design of experiment (DOE), the response surface model (RSM) of design can be obtained by carefully choosing a small quantity of samples in the design space. Pareto genetic algorithm (GA) is used in subsequently optimal design. With optimal design of thin-walled sect...