Date of Award

Fall 2005

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering

Program/Concentration

Mechanical Engineering

Committee Director

Sebastian Bawab

Committee Member

Stephen Cupschalk

Committee Member

Arthur Taylor

Call Number for Print

Special Collections; LD4331.E56 T93 2005

Abstract

One of the major causes of racing fatalities is basilar skull fracture from excessive head motions and neck loading in a frontal impact. There are many head/neck restraints available in the market but HANS head and neck support has proved to be the most efficient one in sled testing. This paper evaluates and compares the performance of the HANS device in MAthematical DYnamic MOdel (MADYMO) software with the sled testing. The tests were conducted for the frontal impact motions, with a crash pulse of 45 G's.

The goal of the tests was to evaluate the performance of HANS without the influence of the seat and steering wheel. Accordingly a sled was constructed in MADYMO software having a seat inclined at 23 degree to the vertical, a knee bolster, a floor plane and a foot plane. A hybrid III 50th percentile dummy was positioned on the seat.

A four-point latch and link racing harness restrained the dummy. A helmet was digitized by Faro Arm, a highly accurate portable measurement arm with six degrees of freedom and converted into a finite element model. A foam layer was constructed inside the helmet in EASiCRASH software so that it fits tightly on the dummy head. Similarly, HANS device was digitized by Faro Ann and converted into a finite element model. Both the helmet and HANS were positioned on the dummy by pre-simulation.

Two runs were conducted with and without the HANS device, respectively, to study the effectiveness of the HANS device on the head motion, neck forces, chest deflection and head injury criteria (RIC).

Rights

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).

DOI

10.25777/0adb-k409

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