Validation of a railway inline seating model for occupants injury biomechanics

Abstract

This paper presents the validation of a finite element model in LS-DYNA of the interior inline seating layout simulating a frontal rail impact event for which the experimental test results provide the reference for the injury biomechanics of the occupants. The representative layout consists in two rows of seats and its supporting structures modelled with nonlinear finite elements and the crash acceleration pulse that represents the impact of the railway vehicle structure is imposed in the floor of the coach. For the appropriate identification of the injury mechanisms to the occupant associated to the frontal crash analysis is used the Hybrid III 50 th percentile Anthropomorphic Testing Device, being the interaction between the occupant model and the structure characterised via penalty contact force models. The validity of the numerical model is discussed to ensure the representativeness of the analysis procedure and to identify the most relevant injury indices of the occupants. In particular the HIC is the most critical injury index for the inline seating layout, with a relative deviation of 6.2% of the simulation result with respect to the experimental test.

Efficient 2D Neck Model for Simulation of the Whiplash Injury Mechanism

“…It also provides accurate and efficient methodologies for the description of the large rigid body motion of the anatomical segments and mechanisms of the ATD [ 12 , 13 ]. However, non-linear finite element methods have an unsurpassed ability to represent all details of the structural deformations being directly linked to geometric modeling software that enables the generation of complex models with simplicity [ 14 , 15 , 16 ]. Multibody models are more efficient and less computationally expensive than finite element models for handling large movement dynamics of ATD models.…”