Side Impact—A Comparison Between Dummies and Cadavers, Correlations Between Cadaver Loads and Injury Severity

The paper presents and discusses results of the FAT research project “Loading Limits and Injury Mechanism of Belted Occupants in Lateral Collisions.” Knowledge of load limits and injury mechanism is a mandatory for the definition and assessment of measures to further increase existing levels of vehicle occupant protection. The effectiveness of vehicle engineering measures is examined by one of the means of experimental simulation utilizing dummies. One of the purposes of this research project was to determine the suitability of dummies as test devices for lateral impact testing. In this connection, correlation of dummy loads and occupant injuries was to be examined in order to establish occupant protection criteria for the marching of test results with dummies with the real world accident scene. The behavior of cadavers and HSRI-, APROD- and Hybrid II dummies is compared in 90° lateral impacts with 50 km/h impact velocity. The test subjects are seated in an Opel kadett car-body struck by the European CCMC barrier. The goal of determining the biofidelity of the new EG dummy could not be achieved by FAT, because first prototypes will not be available before the end of this year. Complementing the results presented at the 9th International Technical Conference an Experimental Safety Vehicles in Kyoto (1) and the 27th Stapp Conference in San Diego (2), this paper will describe test results of 35 cadaver tests at different impact velocities. It presents the comparison of dummies with the cadaver group corresponding to the 50% male dummy based upon anthropometric data. It deals with the correlations between cadaver loads and injuries as well as the cadaver loading limits, a step toward the determination of protection criteria.