Investigation of brain injuries by reconstructions of real world adult pedestrian accidents

Paper in proceeding, 2006

This paper aims at investigating brain injury mechanisms in adult pedestrian accidents by indepth accident analysis and accident reconstructions. In total, 120 adult pedestrian accident cases from the GIDAS database were analysed and 10 of them were reconstructed. The accident reconstructions were first carried out using multi-body system (MBS) pedestrian and car models to acquire the head impact conditions such as head impact velocity, head position and head orientation. These impact conditions were then imposed on a finite element (FE) head model to make it impact against a windscreen model. The pressure and stress distributions of the brain model were calculated and correlated with the injury outcomes in the accidents. The accident analysis revealed that the windscreen and its surrounding frames were the main sources of head/brain injuries for adult pedestrians. The reconstruction results indicated that coup/countercoup pressure, Von Mises and shear stress were important physical parameters to evaluate the brain injury risk.