The Effect of Pre-crash Seat Rotation with and without Feet Support in Highly Automated Vehicle Rear-end Crash
2022-01-1046
03/29/2022
- Event
- Content
- Automotive industry aims at reaching higher levels of driving automation as described in SAE J3016TM. From the perspective of occupant safety, an automated driving system (ADS) shall provide safer conditions for highly automated vehicle (HAV) users compared to standard vehicles since the human error is excluded. In following decades, however, one can expect the mixed fleet of both standard and automated vehicles on roads. Therefore, collision between manually driven cars and HAVs are to be expected. For instance, a research’s result in 2019 showed that 60% of autonomous vehicles crashes was rear-ended. At the same time, future HAVs are mostly considered with non-standard seating configurations. That is, HAVs’ occupants access more room in the vehicle which allows them to rotate their seats to have comfortable positions. This brings a challenging topics for the safety of HAVs’ occupants considering various impact directions. This work aims to address this issue using tools of numerical simulations. We consider an FE model of a seat with standard three-point belt at two initial orientations 45° and 90°. The occupant (50th percentile male) is represented with the Virthuman model. We test the idea of employing the active seat rotation system. By detecting a crash well in time an initially rotated seat is reoriented into a standard seating orientation in a rear-end crash. To improve the rotation system, we propose an additional element in a form of a feet support tool. This device is located around the model’s tibiae and restricts their motion during seat rotation and while a crash is happening. The results are evaluated in terms of occupant’s kinematics and injury risk. They suggest that pre-crash seat rotation can postpone the injury occurrence time in most of the body parts which will provide sufficient time for other safety tools such as airbags.
- Citation
- Talimian, A., and Vychytil, J., "The Effect of Pre-crash Seat Rotation with and without Feet Support in Highly Automated Vehicle Rear-end Crash," SAE Technical Paper 2022-01-1046, 2022, .