The recent real-world experience with the frontal airbags and their sometimes unfortunate interaction with small size adults and children led to the analytical efforts and the results reported in this paper. The focus of this paper is an analytical study investigating the side impact protection performance of side airbags in interaction with, out-of-position occupants. The study evaluates inter...

The use of current seat belts has been shown to be effective in reducing deaths and serious injuries to restrained car occupants by 50% compared to unrestrained. Real world accident studies have identified limitations to the performance of set belts. This has led to the next major evolution in restraint design which is the development of the intelligent restraints. The options for intelligent r...

INTRODUCTION Longitudinal barriers, such as guardrails, are designed to prevent a vehicle that leaves the roadway from impacting a more dangerous object while minimizing the risk of injury to the vehicle occupants. Current full-scale test procedures for these devices do not consider the effect of occupant restraints such as seatbelts and airbags. The purpose of this study was to determine the e...

STUDY DESIGN Literature-based review. OBJECTIVE To review the published data on occupant kinematic and neuromuscular responses during low-speed impacts and analyze how these data inform our understanding of whiplash injury. SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA A stereotypical kinematic and neuromuscular response has been observed in human subjects exposed to rear-end impacts. Combined with various mo...

Black and Hispanic adults travel less in motor vehicles than whites but may be at greater risk when they do travel. Passenger vehicle occupant deaths per 10 million trips among persons ages 25-64 were computed by race, Hispanic origin, gender, and socioeconomic status (SES) using 1995 data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) and Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey. Educatio...

Energy delivery to households can count up to 50% of primary energy consumption in the United States. As proactive response to this classical engineering sentiment, much efforts made to address this energy delivery process, however, have one one caveat in common: targeting at conditioning only air, despite it being a proxy of occupant comfort. What if we rethink the process of how we delivery e...

Occupant behavior can significantly influence the operation and performance of buildings. Many occupant-centric key indicators (KPIs) rely on having accurate counts number occupants in a building, which is very different to how occupancy information currently collected majority buildings today. To address this gap, authors develop standardized methodology for calculation percent space utilizati...

A cooperative research project with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) was conducted to evaluate the capability of a Tubular Thoracic Cushion (TTC) airbag concept to significantly reduce rib deflections for the SID-IIs dummy in the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s (IIHS) side-impact barrier test. The concept of the TTC airbag was to efficiently distribute a major...

Rollover is not the most common type of accident, but the consequences may be serious. Understanding of the injury mechanisms during the complex rollover movement is limited and requires further investigation. ln-depth investigations of 21 Volvo cars involved in rollover crashes were analysed with regards to cause and outcome. Detailed information was examined about the crash scenario, the road...