Abstract:

The impact response of pedestrian headform was analyzed to understand the influence of vehicle hood design in assessment tests of pedestrian protection performance. The impact pulse (acceleration-time history) of the pedestrian headform generally composed of multiple peaks. Each phase was dominated by
location specific factors, including active mass, structural stiffness, boundary constraints and deformation space under vehicle hood. Vehicle hood design shall take into account of these dominating factors under given design constraints to minimize value of the head injury criterion. As an application example, the study presented a sandwich hood structure design on a production vehicle model. The results show that the sandwich hood structure can prove capable of improving the headform protection performance compared to conventional hood.

Key words: vehicle safety, headform impactor, vehicle hood, multi-phase impact pulse, structure design strategy, sandwich structure