Effects of the windshield inclination angle on head/brain injuries in car-to-pedestrian collisions using computational biomechanics models

Abstract

Car-to-pedestrian collision (CPC) accidents occur frequently, and pedestrians often suffer serious head/brain injuries. One major cause is the primary impact with the windshield. Here, we use a numerical simulation method to study the influence of the windshield inclination angle of a passenger car on pedestrian head/brain injury due to CPC accidents. The range of the windshield inclination angle was set to 24°–50°, with an interval of 2°. The results show that the windshield angle significantly affects the pedestrian kinematics and exerts different effects on the head injury when evaluating with various head injury criteria. Regarding the head peak linear/rotational acceleration and acceleration-based criteria head injury criterion (HIC)/rotational injury criterion (RIC), the predictions at the secondary impact stage have no clear relationship with the windshield angle (R2 = 0.04, 0.07, 0.03 and 0.26, respectively), and their distributions are scattered. In the primary impact, the peak linear acceleration and HIC show a weak trend of first decreasing and then increasing with the increasing of the windshield angle, and the rotational acceleration and RIC tend to remain relatively constant. Regarding the cumulative strain damage measure (CSDM) criterion, the predictions at the primary impact are slightly lower than those at the secondary impact, and the trend of first decreasing and then increasing with the increase in the windshield angle is observed at both impact stages. When the windshield inclination angle is approximately 32°–40°, the head injury severity in both impact phases is generally lower than that predicted at other windshield angles.