Lee 1 VEHICLE HOOD AND BUMPER STRUCTURE DESIGN TO MITIGATE CASUALTIES OF PEDESTRIAN ACCIDENTS

Although the number of pedestrian fatalities and injuries is steadily declining worldwide, pedestrian protection is still an important issue. Extensive researches have been carried out for pedestrian protection in order to establish regulations for pedestrian safety. The automobile hoods and bumpers, which pedestrians frequently collide into during accidents, should be designed for the safety of the pedestrians. Two analysis methods, a real experiment and computer simulation, are utilized to design safe structures of the hood and the bumper. A real experiment is very expensive while computer simulation has modeling imperfections. It would be optimal to obtain all the data from experiments to identify the design tendency. However, computer simulation is generally used due to budget restrictions. In this research, a method, which uses an experiment and simulation simultaneously, is developed. Orthogonal arrays are employed to link the two methods. The minimum number of experiments is allocated to some rows of an orthogonal array and the simulations are allocated to the rest of the rows. Experiments should be allocated to have the cases of the experiments orthogonal. Mathematical error analysis is conducted. Based on the proposed methods, a hood and a bumper are designed to protect pedestrians. Real experiments and computer simulations are conducted for the rows of orthogonal arrays. The results show that the errors are distributed uniformly and a precise design is obtained.