Development of 6 Years Old Child Virtual Model by Automatic Scaling 2014-01-2028

Traffic accidents cause one of the highest numbers of severe injuries in the whole population. The numbers of deaths or seriously injured citizens prove that traffic accidents and their consequences are still a serious problem to be solved.

A lot of effort is devoted to both passive and active safety systems development. The transportation standards usually define safety requirements by regulations (e.g. ECE-R94, 96/79/EC and ECE-R95, 96/27/EC in Europe) with specific dummies for children to be used. The dummies include hardware sensors for monitoring accelerations, loads and other signals and each dummy is developed for a specific scenario, but there are limitations of these dummies, such as only a specific age or calibration just for a specific test. Taking into account that the consequence of a traffic accident is highly influenced by the stature of the body, virtual human body models, including those for children, start to play a significant role because they can be scaled or even personalized towards a particular population or even a particular person.

The paper contributes to the field of vehicle safety technology concerning child restraint systems development, assessment and optimization with a virtual numerical approach. The goal of the paper is to exploit the previously developed scaling algorithm to create a virtual model of a six-year-old (6YO) child and to compare its response to the virtual dummy used for child safety in order to propose an automatic scaling process for a population-based vehicle safety assessment.

The automatic scaling algorithm developing virtual human body models for a given age and gender is used to create the virtual 6YO child model. The algorithm scales body dimensions and particular segments' mass and the flexibility of the body is driven by flexindex and stiffness scaling.

The performance of the automatically developed virtual 6YO child model was tested in frontal and lateral directions. The frontal response was tested with a standard sled test simulation using the standardized AAMA pulse in the frontal direction. The lateral response was tested with a side barrier impact test. The results of both tests were compared to the validated virtual Q6 Child Dummy FE model.

The paper shows good performance of the automatic scaling process for developing 6YO virtual model for safety assessment. The automatically developed 6YO child model corresponds well from both the anthropological point of view and performance point of view to the existing validated dummy model.