Adaptive Car Seat Control for Whiplash Mitigation
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Date
2022Author
Kaya, Ali Güneş
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Whiplash is one of the mostly encountered injuries in rear impacts in road-traffic
accidents, which is typically characterized by neck pain due to stress and strain in the soft
tissues. A smart system design, which can easily be applied to existing passenger car
seats, aiming to reduce the impact load on the neck and thus lower the whiplash risk
during a rear-end car crash is carried out in this study. A semiactively controlled sliding
seat integrated with a validated magnetorheolohical (MR) damper model, which is placed
between seat-pan and car floor, is co-simulated with an experimentally validated
biodynamic human body model where seat-occupant interaction is taken into
consideration. A benchmark study which compares the whiplash mitigation performance
of the proposed system in this study to a state-of-the-art anti-whiplash car seat design in
the literature is performed by using moderately and highly severe crash pulses. It is shown
in the simulations that the proposed semiactive design outperforms the state-of-the-art
seat design in the literature by further reducing the load on the upper neck of the occupant
by 4 kg under both crash severities with velocity changes of 16 km/h and 24 km/h. A
novel performance parameter to evaluate whiplash risk is also proposed, which can be
utilized in crash safety designs and crash tests. The findings in this study can be used in
adaptive seats to further reduce whiplash risk in road-traffic accidents including rear impact. This study also acts as a starting point for future seat safety designs in autonomous
vehicles where occupants will be faced with varying crash severities at different seating
configurations.