Body Concept Design for Pedestrian Head Impact

In 1996, the European Enhanced Vehicle Safety Committee, Working Group 17 (EEVC WG17) proposed a set of impact procedures to evaluate the pedestrian injury risk of vehicle fronts. These procedures address three aspects of pedestrian protection head impacts, lower limb impacts, and thigh impacts through vehicle subsystem tests. The criteria assessed during these impact tests are affected by the design of most parts of the vehicle body front-end. One of the challenges to vehicle design introduced by these tests is the impact of an adult pedestrian headform to the top of the fender. The proposed acceptance level for Head Injury Criterion (HIC) is less than 1000 during impacts at 40 kmlh. This paper uses the finite element (FE) method to predict the influence of proposed fender and shotgun design modifications aimed at meeting this target. In addition, the known issues with the implementation of these proposed changes are discussed. Although the proposed changes are shown to meet the target in the theoretical analyses presented in this paper, these changes are also demonstrated to conflict with other aspects of vehicle safety (frontal visibility and frontal high-speed impact), vehicle manufacturing, and durability.