A new pedestrian dummy, constructed to produce realistic vehicle damage

More information

Main author

Weyde, M.

Co-Authors

Jager, S.; Knape, M.

Type of media

PDF

Publication type

Lecture

Publication year

2012

Publisher

21. EVU Conference, Brasov

Citation

Weyde, M.: Construction and testing of a pedestrian dummy for realistic vehicle damage in experimental simulations of car vs. pedestrian collisions

The comparEVU 2012 Brasov Weydeison of crash tests with most of the dummies used for pedestrian collisions shows that the damages produced thereby do no coincide in essential points with the damage that can be observed in real accidents. The reason for this is to assume that the design of the dummies used matches usually only very limited with humans. In particular, the high structural strength of some dummies that are used as substitutes in pedestrian crash tests leads to intense damage to the front of the car, which is usually not to bee seen after real accidents where pedestrians are involved. After real accidents involving pedestrians are however usually only small deformations with typical large radii in the metal sheets. However, since the pattern of damage is a significant starting point for the assessment of the impact speed by accident investigators, staff and students in the engineering office Priester & Weyde have constructed, built, tested and developed an alternative replacement body for pedestrians, which is suitable for crash tests with Cars to produce a damage, which corresponds to that of real accidents. In various studies, bachelor and diploma theses this target has been achieved successfully as a community task by the so-called „Dummy-Consortium“.The students, who were supervised in the engineering bureau Priester & Weyde in Berlin, had the helpful support from Prof. Dr. Kramer (HTW Dresden) and Prof. Otte (HTW Berlin), as well as the specialists in forensic medicine from the Charité Berlin, Dr. med. Oesterhelweg and Dr. med. Hartwig. As part of the students' work several dummies were built as substitutes and tested in crash tests. A real car-pedestrian accident - in which the car was equipped with an event data recorder (EDR) - was enacted by various types of dummy. The data to the real accident were kindly provided by Dipl.-Ing. Roy Strzeletz (Unfallanalyse Berlin). This pedestrian replacement body, called BD-dummy, is described in this article as well as one of the performed crash experiments.