• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.29 no.6 s.237
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• pp.913-920
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• 2005

Compared to previous in-vitro test, FE model showed reliable motion patterns. A finite element model of a 50th percentile male neck was developed to study the mechanics of whiplash injury while the rear impacts. The model was consisted of the whole cervical vertebrae including part of occipital, intervertebral discs. which were modeled using linear viscoelastic materials and posterior elements. The sliding interfaces were defined to simulate contact phenomena in facet joints and in odontoid process. All ligaments and atlanto-occipital membrane were modeled as nonlinear bar elements. Only muscle elements were not considered. Motion of each cervical vertebra was obtained from the dynamic simulation with a MADYMO model for 15 km/h $40\%$ rear end offset impacts. Soft tissue neck injury(STNI) was investigated with a developed FE model. In FE model analysis, the high stress was appeared at C3/C4 disc in offset impact. Further research is still needed in order to improve the developed neck FE model for many different crash patterns.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Automotive Engineers
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.128-136
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• 2003

In today's design trend of vehicle structure, crush zone is fiequently reinforced by adding a box-shaped sub-frame in order to avoid an excessive deformation against a high-speed offset barrier such as EU Directive 96/97 EC, IIHS offset test. That kind of vehicle structure design results in a relatively monotonic crash pulse for airbag ECU(Electronic Control Unit) located at non-crush zone. As for an angular crash event, the measured crash signal using a single-axis accelerometer in a longitudinal direction is usually weaker than that of frontal barrier crash. Therefore, it is not so easy task to achieve a satisfactory crash discrimination performance for offset and angular crash events. In this paper, we introduce a new crash discrimination algorithm using an electronic X-Y 2-axis accelerometer in order to improve crash discrimination performance especially for those crash events. The proposed method uses a crash signal in lateral direction(Y-axis) as well as in longitudinal direction(X-axis). A crash severity measure obtained from Y-axis acceleration is used to improve the discrimination between fire and no-fire events. The result obtained by the proposed measure is logically ORed with an existing algorithm block using X-axis crash signal. Simulation and pulse injection test have been conducted to verify the performance of proposed algorithm by using real crash data of a 2,000cc passenger vehicle.