Adaptive Car Seat Control for Whiplash Mitigation

Abstract

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.