Evaluation of Thoracic Injury Risk of Heavy Goods Vehicle Occupants during Steering Wheel Rim Impacts to Different Rib Levels

Sammanfattning: The interior of heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) differs from passenger cars. Both the steering wheel and the occupant are positioned differently in a HGV and increases the risk of steering wheel rim impacts. Such impact scenarios are relatively unexplored compared to passenger car safety studies that are more prevalent within the field of injury biomechanics. The idea with using human body models (HBMs) is to complement current crash test dummies with biomechanical data. Furthermore, the biofidelity of a crash dummy for loading similar to a steering wheel rimimpact is relatively unstudied and especially to different rib levels. Therefore, the aim with this thesis was to evaluate HGV occupant thoracic response between THUMS v4.0 and Hybrid III (H3) during steering wheel rim impacts with respect to different rib levels (level 1-2, 3-4, 6-7, 7-8, 9-10) with regards to ribs, aorta, liver, and spleen. To the author’s best knowledge, use of local injury risk functions for thoracic injuries is fairly rare compared to the predominant usage of global injury criteria that mainly predicts the most commonthoracic injury risk, i.e. rib fractures. Therefore, local injury criteria using experimental test datahave been developed for the ribs and the organs. The measured parameters were chest deflectionand steering wheel to thorax contact force on a global level, whilst 1st principal Green-Lagrangestrains was assessed for the rib and the organ injury risk. The material models for the liver and the spleen were remodelled using an Ogden material model based on experimental stress-strain data to account for hyperelasticity. Rate-dependency was included by iteration of viscoelastic parameters. The contact modelling of the organs was changed from a sliding contact to a tied contact to minimize unrealistic contact separations during impact. The results support previous findings that H3 needs additional instrumentation to accurately register chest deflection for rib levels beyond its current range, namely at ribs 1-2, 7-8, and 9-10. For THUMS, the chest deflection were within reasonable values for the applied velocities, but there were no definite injury risk. Fact is, the global injury criteria might overpredict the AIS3 injury risk (rib fractures) for rib level 1-2, 7-8, and 9-10. The rib strains could not be correlated with the measured chest deflections. This was explained by the unique localized loading characterized by pure steering wheel rim impact that mainly affected the sternum and the rib cartilage while minimizing rib deformation. The organ strains indicate some risk of rupture where the spleen deforms the most at rib levels 3-4 and 6-7, and the liver and the aorta at rib levels 6-7 and 7-8. This study provides a framework for complementing H3 with THUMS for HGV occupant safety with emphasis on the importance of using local injury criteria for functional injury prediction, i.e. prediction of injury risk using parameters directly related to rib fracture or organ rupture. Local injury criteria are thus a powerful safety assessment tool as it is independent on exterior loading such as airbag, steering wheel hub, or seat belt loading. It was noticed that global injury criteria with very localized impacts such as rim impacts have not been studied and will affect rib fracture risk differently than what has been studied using airbag or seat belt restraints. However, improvements are needed to accurately predict thoracic injury risk at a material level by finding more data for the local injury risk functions. Conclusively, it is clear that Hybrid III has insufficient instrumentation and is in need of upgrades to register chest deflections at multiple rib levels. Furthermore, the following are needed: better understanding of global injury criteria specific for HGV occupant safety evaluation, more data for age-dependent (ribs) and rate-dependent (organs) injury risk functions, a tiebreak contact with tangential sliding for better organ kinematics during impacts, and improving the biofidelity of the material models using data from tissue level experiments.