Advances in Engineering Software 90 (2015) 22–40

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Advances in Engineering Software

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A numerical study of occupant responses and injuries in vehicular

crashes into roadside barriers based on finite element simulations
Ning Li a, Howie Fang a,∗, Chao Zhang a, Matthew Gutowski a, Emre Palta a, Qian Wang b
a
Department of Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Science, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, North Carolina 28223, USA
b
Department of Civil and Environment Engineering, Manhattan College, Riverdale, New York 10471, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Occupant responses and injuries are important considerations in the design and assessment of roadside
Received 3 March 2015 safety devices such as barriers. Although incorporating occupant responses and injuries into the design of
Revised 1 May 2015
safety devices is highly recommended by the current safety regulations, there are limited studies that directly
Accepted 7 June 2015
consider occupant responses and injuries. Crash test dummies are seldom equipped in the state-of-the-art
Available online 3 July 2015
crash testing of roadside barriers and thus occupant responses and injury risks are evaluated primarily based
Keywords: on vehicle responses. In the present work, occupant responses and injuries in automotive crash events were
Crash test dummy investigated by incorporating crash test dummies into the vehicle model that was used in the finite element
Occupant injury criteria (FE) simulations of roadside crashes. The FE models of a Ford F250 pickup truck and a Hybrid III 50th per-
Roadside barrier centile crash test dummy were employed and a passive restraint system was developed in the FE model.
Crash simulation The FE model was validated using existing experiments including a sled test and a full-frontal impact test.
Finite element (FE)
Simulations of the Ford F250 impacting a concrete barrier and a W-beam guardrail were conducted and the
Concrete barrier
W-beam guardrail
occupant responses were analyzed. Furthermore, occupant injuries were quantitatively estimated using oc-
cupant injury criteria based directly on dummy responses and compared to those based solely on vehicle
responses. The correlations between vehicle responses and occupant injuries were studied.
© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction be used to assess occupant responses such as accelerations, forces,

Traffic barriers are effective safety devices in preventing vehicles
from crossing the median so as to avoid head-on collisions. Median
barriers are especially effective in reducing the chances of small, light
passenger vehicles crashing into large, heavy vehicles. In the current
safety standard, the Manual for Assessing Safety Hardware (MASH)
[1], the impact performances of a barrier system under vehicular im-
pacts are assessed by “the risk of injury to the occupants of the im-
pacting vehicle,” “the structural adequacy of the safety feature” and
“the post-impact behavior of the test vehicle” [1]. Although the occu-
pants should not experience severe or fatal injuries, there is currently
no crash dummy specified by MASH to be used in barrier crash testing
to obtain occupant responses.
The ultimate goal of designing a median barrier system is to save
life and minimize the injury to the occupant. It is of great signifi-
cance to comprehend the mechanism of occupant injury in automo-
tive crashes. To establish proper injury criteria for estimating the lev-
els of injury severity, it is necessary to study the parameters that can
∗
Corresponding author. Tel: +1 704 687 8328.
E-mail address: hfang@uncc.edu (H. Fang).
stresses, and strains. Over the years, a number of injury criteria have
been established to estimate the level of human injuries. Research on
injuries of human bodies including the head, neck, thorax, abdomen,
pelvis, and lower extremities has been conducted in the field of im-
pact biomechanics in the last 60 years [2,3]. Since different parts of
the body have different injury mechanisms, injury criteria for differ-
ent body regions have been proposed for assessing the restraint sys-
tem in automotive crashes [4,5]. For example, the head injury criteria
(HIC) [6], which was based on the head translational accelerations,
was adopted by the U.S. federal government in the Federal Motor Ve-
hicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) No. 208 [7]. A certain HIC value cor-
responds to a certain probability of a skull fracture. Although injury
criteria should be established for each type of injuries for different
body parts, directly evaluation of injury criteria on human bodies in
vehicular crashes is nearly impractical. There are two approaches to
study occupant responses and injury criteria in vehicular crashes: the
direct approach that employs a crash test dummy [8] and the indi-
rect approach that utilizes the dynamic vehicle responses. For the di-
rect approach, crash test dummies are instrumented to record data on
its dynamic behavior in vehicle impact tests and injury levels can be
determined using the measured quantities. With their good repeata-
bility and controllability, crash test dummies are often used to help

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.advengsoft.2015.06.004
0965-9978/© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
 N. Li et al. / Advances in Engineering Software 90 (2015) 22–40
establish injury criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of occupant
protection system in vehicle designs.
Full-scale crash testing [9,10] and computer simulation are the
two most common approaches to evaluate the impact performances
of barrier systems before their placements on highways. Since it is
infeasible to test all possible crash scenarios using physical testing,
computer simulations, such as those using finite element (FE) anal-
ysis, provide a supplemental way to study barrier impact perfor-
mances and evolve new designs. Once reliable FE models such as
vehicle and median barrier are established, different impact condi-
tions could be studied. Over the past two decades, researchers at
the National Crash Analysis Center (NCAC) have developed a num-
ber of FE models of various vehicles that could be used to study ve-
hicular crashworthiness and roadside barrier crashes. These vehicles
vary from small passenger cars to pickup trucks and are available in
the public domain. To construct these FE models, reverse engineer-
ing technique was used [11,12] and the majority of the models were
partially or fully validated using experimental data of full-frontal im-
pacts. These models released by NCAC have been widely used in sim-
ulation studies of median barrier crashes and consistently modified
and improved by various users. Besides a number of vehicle models,
NCAC has also developed a number of roadside barrier FE models in-
cluding a concrete barrier, W-beam guardrail and cable median bar-
rier [13]. With the FE models of vehicle and roadside barrier systems,
computer simulations can be conducted to evaluate the impact per-
formances of the barriers [14–17].
Although examining the vehicle responses and barrier perfor-
mances is helpful to assess occupant safety in a crash, the occupant
responses should be directly examined. This is because, as pointed
out in MASH [1], the relationship between occupant risk and vehicle
dynamics during interaction with roadside barriers is very difficult to
be quantified. For example, a safe vehicle response may indicate a po-
tentially satisfactory occupant safety but not a guarantee. To this end,
incorporating a crash test dummy in the crash testing of barrier sys-
tems serves as a means to directly evaluate occupant safety. Crash test
dummies are full-scale anthropomorphic test devices that are used
by the automotive industry for decades to simulate human bodies
and instrumented to record data of dynamic responses in vehicular
impact testing. Incorporating a crash test dummy in the crash testing
of roadside barriers is ideal but difficult due to the high cost, level of
instrumentation, and required expertise. As a result, using crash test
dummy is encouraged but not required in the current safety standard,
MASH. Nevertheless, there is no obvious impedance to incorporating
a dummy model, such as those used in vehicle crashworthiness de-
sign in automobile industry [18–20], in the crash simulations of road-
side barriers.
The first technique to develop FE models of occupants in crashes
was aimed at crash test dummies rather than the real human beings;
this strategy was referred as “crash test dummy based modeling”
[21–30]. In developing FE models of crash test dummies, the whole
dummy was disassembled into a number of units such as head, neck,
shoulders, thorax, lumbar spine, pelvis, and lower and upper extrem-
ities. Each of these units is composed of a few small components.
These individual components with reasonable meshes and material
properties are assembled into the corresponding larger unit. At the
unit level various testing was done to ensure consistency between
FE simulation results and test data [21]. Finally the FE model of the
entire dummy was validated in a sled testing configuration. A second
approach in developing the FE models of crash test dummies adopted
a design strategy directly based on accurate and detailed representa-
tions of human bodies. These models resembled a real human body
in geometry and structures and naturally incorporated the effects of
body size, posture, and muscular activity. For example, Gayzik et al.
[31] used three techniques namely the computed tomography, mag-
netic resonance imaging (MRI) and upright MRI to scan the geometry
of a human body and construct an FE model. The disadvantage of this
23
approach is that human bodies are generally too complicated to be
modeled accurately and thus models based directly on human bodies
have not been widely used as dummy based models.
The need to incorporate occupant injuries into the design and
evaluation of roadside barriers requires in-depth understanding of
occupant responses in roadside crashes. In this study, the occupant
responses and injuries during roadside barrier crashes were eval-
uated based on crash dummy responses using FE simulations. The
major research objectives of this study were to: (1) incorporate a
crash test dummy model with a vehicular model in crash simulations
of roadside barriers; (2) validate the integrated dummy and vehicle
model using existing data of crash tests; and (3) investigate dummy
responses in crash simulations and study the correlation of occupant
based on dummy responses and those based on vehicle responses.
In Section 2, the FE model of a 2006 Ford F250 pickup truck with
airbag, steering wheel and column, dashboard, and seatbelt is pre-
sented and a Hybrid III 50th percentile human dummy model is in-
corporated into the vehicle model. This integrated model is validated
in Section 3 based on test data of a sled test and a full-frontal impact.
Occupant injury criteria based on human responses and vehicle re-
sponses are discussed in Sections 4 and 5, respectively. An analysis of
occupant injuries in roadside crashes into a concrete barrier and a W-
beam guardrail is presented in Sections 6 and 7. Finally, the correla-
tion between vehicle responses and occupant injuries are discussed.
2. An integrated finite element model
2.1. Ford F250 pickup truck
The FE model of a 2006 Ford F250 pickup truck developed at NCAC
[32] was chosen as the base model in this research. This vehicle model
had 738,165 nodes, 698,501 shell elements, 2353 beam elements, and
25,905 solid elements as shown in Fig. 1a. The mass of the vehicle was
approximated 2500 kg, which met the TL-3 requirement of a 2270P
test vehicle (pickup truck) specified by MASH. This vehicle model was
validated by NCAC using a full-frontal impact test, and exhibited nu-
merical instability in barrier crash simulations. To use it in the current
work, this model was revised by eliminating initial penetrations and
redefining contact between parts wherever necessary to improve its
numerical stability and simulation accuracy.
In the NCAC model, the steering (excluding steering wheel and
column) and suspension components were modeled but some com-
partment components such as the seat, dashboard, and the restraint
systems were not considered. The passive restraint system, i.e., the
airbag and seatbelt, is important for occupant protection in a crash
event. Although it may not contribute significantly to the overall ve-
hicle responses, the passive restraint system is critical to reduce the
impact forces and accelerations on the occupant. Without passive re-
straint system, it is impossible to incorporate an occupant (dummy)
model into the vehicle model and study occupant responses in road-
way crashes. In this study, the FE models of the airbag (see Fig. 1b),
steering wheel and column, dashboard, and seatbelt were added to
the FE model of the Ford F250 along with a Hybrid III dummy model
(see Fig. 1c).
2.1.1. Airbag modeling
Modeling airbag deployment and its after-deployment interaction
with external objects such as the steering wheel has been a challeng-
ing task, particularly when considering fabric density, bag elasticity,
inflation and venting rate, etc. [33,34]. The deployment of an airbag
starts with the inflator that triggers a rapid chemical reaction to gen-
erate and pump nitrogen gas into the fabric bag to inflate it.
To simulate the airbag, the inflator needs to be characterized on
the mass flow rate during deployment, which can be done using an
airbag tank test [35]. In the tank test, the inflator was ignited and
exploded inside a constant volume tank and the gas pressure history
24 N. Li et al. / Advances in Engineering Software 90 (2015) 22–40
Fig. 1. FE models of a 2006 Ford F250 pickup truck [32], a deployed airbag, and a Hybrid III crash test dummy.
Fig. 2. Illustration of a seatbelt system including a D-ring and retractor [36].
was measured and used for deriving the mass flow rate ṁ as follows.
cv ṗVt
ṁ =
c p RTi
where ṗ is the gas pressure rate inside the tank, Ti is the constant
inflator temperature, Vt is the known tank volume, and cv , c p and R
are three gas constants.
Applying the above equation to the pressure data measured on the
driver side airbag of a 2001 Ford F150 in the tank test by NHTSA, the
mass flow rate was obtained and used as the air flow input for a real-
istic airbag model. The airbag control volume model in LS-DYNA, i.e.,
∗AIRBAG_SIMPLE_AIRBAG_MODEL, was used in this study. To make
the airbag more realistic, nitrogen gas properties were used and the
airbag fabric material properties were obtained from Avula et al. [33].
The fabric had a thickness of 0.35 mm, a density of 1000 kg/m3 ,
Young’s Modulus of 100 MPa, and a Poisson’s ratio of 0.4. Contacts
were defined and the aforementioned airbag input mass flow rate
was used.
2.1.2. Seatbelt modeling
A seatbelt is an effective and mandatory safety device in a vehi-
cle’s restraint system to protect the occupant in a crash. The most
commonly used seatbelt is the three-point restraint system that is
composed of a belt fixed at one end, a D-ring, and a retractor, as illus-
trated in Fig. 2.
Seatbelt modeling involves modeling the retractor, the D-ring and
the belt fabric. The retractor model in LS-DYNA is based on a simpli-
fied concept of a physical retractor and requires the user to provide
a loading curve (load vs. pullout) and an unloading curve (load vs.
payout). The terms pullout and payout are defined as the lengths of
belt extracted from and retreated into the retractor, respectively. The
seatbelt force is determined by the load curve based on the belt pull-
out. Both locking and load limiting mechanisms can be simulated us-
ing the corresponding retractor loading curves. Any slack in the belt
is eaten up to maintain a tightened belt. The D-ring is modeled by
a slipring element in LS-DYNA with no geometric representation of
the physical ring. The slipring element is essentially a nodal point at-
tached or fixed to the vehicle’s frame. No belt slip will occur if the
forces in the belt on both sides of the ring satisfy the following equi-
librium condition:
T1
= eμθ (2)
T2
where T1 is and T2 are the belt forces, μ is the coefficient of friction
between the belt and D-ring, and θ is the wrap angle. The coefficient
of friction is the only parameter needs to be provided by the user;
the wrap angle is calculated during the simulation based on the belt
positions.
The belt fabric model was consisted two types of elements, shell
elements for contacts with the dummy and seatbelt elements for load
bearing (equivalent to rod elements but with the ability to go through
the D-ring element). The material of the belt is usually made of inter-
woven cottons and nylons and can be modeled by MAT_FABRIC in
(1) LS-DYNA.
2.1.3. Steering column and dashboard modeling
Most of the cars today are equipped with collapsible steering
columns. While the exact mechanism varies from design to design,
the basic form remains the same. Part of the column is manufactured
using diamond structure which is less stiff and easy to be compressed
once a force is introduced. The magnitude of force on the steering
column may go up to a few kilo-Newtons before the steering col-
umn collapse. To simulate its collapse, a steering column was typi-
cally modeled as two rigid pieces jointed by a translational joint to
allow relative movement along their longitudinal direction. In a real
vehicle, a universal joint is used to connect the steering column to
the steering gear box so as to convert rotations to translational mo-
tions. This conversion was modeled by a spherical joint that allowed
the steering column to rotate about the steering gear box. This sim-
ple FE model captured the main features of the steering column, i.e.
collapsible and free to rotate. The dashboard in a real motor vehicle
has a complex geometry and connections with surrounding compo-
nents. The exact replica of the real dashboard structure is nontrivial
and unnecessary to crash analysis. In the FE model, a plastic layer was
constructed using shell elements to represent the geometric surface
of the dashboard.
2.2. Hybrid III crash test dummy
The FE model of a Hybrid III 50th percentile male dummy de-
veloped by NCAC [28–30] was used to obtain occupant responses in
 N. Li et al. / Advances in Engineering Software 90 (2015) 22–40
Fig. 3. Comparison of simulated dummy responses to a sled test.
roadside barrier crash simulations. This dummy model (see Fig. 1c)
had 228,000 nodes, 210,439 shell elements, 242 beam elements and
186,800 solid elements. It adopted elastic materials for the skeleton,
viscoelastic material (MAT_006 in LS-DYNA) for the polyvinyl skin,
simple rubber model (MAT_007 in LS-DYNA) for rubber parts, and
viscous foam (MAT_062 in LS-DYNA) for foam parts. Accelerometers
were installed on the head, chest and pelvis of the dummy. A lin-
ear potentiometer was installed in the dummy’s chest to measure
chest compression. Load cells were installed on the femur bones to
measure the axial forces. The numerical stability and accuracy of this
dummy model was improved by removing initial penetrations and re-
defining contact between parts. The improved dummy FE model was
validated in a sled test and a frontal impact test.
The vehicle and dummy models from NCAC were developed us-
ing reverse engineering techniques and the material properties were
based on component or coupon testing. In this study, the models were
improved by re-meshing and using more sophisticated contact algo-
rithms (e.g., automatic-general-interior) between parts with complex
geometry and/or involving edge contacts. A number of initial pene-
trations were observed in the original vehicle and dummy models.
These initial penetrations were removed in this study by re-meshing
combined with part separation (which was done by shrinking the
penetrating parts to the smallest amount but enough to eliminate the
penetrations). In the improved model of this study, the material prop-
erties were kept the same as those in the original models.
2.3. Roadside barriers
Two commonly used barrier systems, the New Jersey concrete
safety shape barriers and the G4 (1s) W-beam guardrails, were used
in the roadside barrier impact simulations. Concrete barriers have a
large rigidity compared to the vehicular structures; so they do not de-
form much and often referred as rigid barriers. In the FE model, the
concrete barrier was modeled using shell elements on its geomet-
ric surface and a rigid material model (MAT_020 in LS-DYNA) was
adopted.
The G4 (1s) W-beam guardrail is a semi-rigid barrier system.
It consists of rivet-connected steel W-beam rails mounted on steel
posts typically spaced at 1.905 m (6 ft. 3 in.). A wood or steel block-out
is added between the rails and posts to reduce the chance of vehicle
tires snagging on the posts during impacts. Modeling of the W-beam
25
guardrail imposed more challenges than the concrete barrier since
more meshes are required to describe the rich details and capture
the deformation of the guardrail components. In this study, material
properties of the guardrail and soil foundation were obtained from
the W-beam guardrail model developed at NCAC [32].
3. Model validations
3.1. Sled test
The dummy model was first validated using experimental data of
a sled test as shown in Fig. 3. The D-Ring, which played an important
role in relating the shoulder belt force to retractor force, was modeled
using a slip-ring element in LS-DYNA. By adjusting the coefficient of
friction μ between the belt and D-ring, better correlation with test
data could be reached.
In Fig. 3, the kinematics of crash dummy in both the sled test and
numerical simulations are compared at three time instants. With the
improved dummy model, the kinematic profiles were shown to be
consistent with test results, especially the head position and upper
body posture. It was also noted that there was a discrepancy between
the simulated forearm positions at 150 ms and test data, i.e., the sim-
ulated forearm was oriented more vertically comparing to that in the
test. Nevertheless, the dummy model was still considered accurate
enough in capturing dummy responses based on the time histories
of deformations, accelerations and contact forces. Fig. 4 shows the
simulated chest compression compared to test data. It can be seen
that the simulation results match well to test data in both the over-
all trend and peak value. Fig. 5 shows the acceleration histories of
the dummy head, chest, and pelvis from the simulation and test. The
dummy model was found to be capable of capturing the peak acceler-
ations at these three locations as well as matching the overall trends
of the accelerations. Fig. 6 shows the time histories of axial forces in
the left and right femur bones from both simulation and sled test. The
simulation results were shown to compare favorably with test data. It
was also observed that, compared to the original NCAC model in sled
test [30], the present dummy model showed improved accuracy in
predicting head accelerations and femur forces, which were impor-
tant to the occupant injury evaluation.
26 N. Li et al. / Advances in Engineering Software 90 (2015) 22–40
Fig. 4. Dummy chest compressions in the sled test.
3.2. Full-frontal impact test
Full-frontal crash tests are usually used in crashworthiness analy-
sis to test the restraint system such as airbag, seatbelt and knee bol-
ster. In a full-frontal crash test, a vehicle with a restraint system and a
Fig. 5. Time histories of resultant accelerations in the sled test: (a) head; (b) chest; and (c) pelvis.
crash dummy impacts a rigid wall at 56.3 km/h (35 mph). The acceler-
ation histories of a test vehicle at different locations were measured
by accelerometers and used to study vehicular crashworthiness. Ac-
celerometers were typically mounted at the center of gravity (CG),
rear deck, rear seat cross-members, and top and bottom of the en-
gine. All accelerations were measured in the local coordinate systems
of the accelerometers and the raw data were filtered using an SAE CFC
filter (60 Hz).
Using the revised FE model of the pickup truck, a full-frontal im-
pact simulation was performed and the simulated vehicle profiles
were compared to test data (see Fig. 7). It was observed from the com-
parison that the simulated vehicle deformation matched well to test-
ing results. Fig. 8 shows the time history of total impact force from
the simulation compared to that from the test (i.e., measured by the
load cells on the rigid wall). Fig. 9 shows the time histories of vehicle
accelerations along vehicle longitudinal direction from both simula-
tion results and test data. It can be seen that the simulation results
generally matched well to test data, especially on the peak accelera-
tions and their timing. There were noticeably two peaks in the time
history of impact forces; the first one was due to the buckling of the
pickup truck chassis/frame and the second one was due to the subse-
quent motion of engine and rear cargo/deck. Since accelerations were
affected by impact forces, similar peaks were also observed in the
time histories of accelerations at the CG, seat cross-members and rear
deck.
 N. Li et al. / Advances in Engineering Software 90 (2015) 22–40 27

Fig. 6. Time histories of axial forces in the sled test: (a) left femur and (b) right femur.

Fig. 7. Comparison of vehicle deformations in a full-frontal impact: (a) test and (b) simulation.

test data on dummy accelerations at three locations, i.e., head, chest,

Fig. 8. Time history of the total impact force in the full-frontal impact.
The dummy responses in the full-frontal impact simulation were
also studied and compared with test data, as shown in Fig. 10. The
comparison showed that simulation results had a good match with
and pelvis. The acceleration histories showed that the peak accelera-
tions occurred at approximately 50 ms on the pelvis, at 70 ms in the
chest, and at 80 ms on the head. This observation was consistent with
the fact that the load was transferred from the lower body to the up-
per body. The loads on the dummy were the results of contacting with
the vehicle’s interior parts, which were categorized into four main
groups: (1) the knee impacting the knee bolster; (2) the pelvis and
back contacting the seat; (3) head impacting the airbag; and (4) the
chest and pelvis being constrained by the seatbelt. While the dummy
model captured head accelerations well in the simulation, the simu-
lated peak acceleration on the pelvis lasted approximately 5 ms in-
stead of a sharp peak as seen in test data.
Significant challenges existed in validating the combined model,
such as interactions between the dummy and vehicle components,
particularly the airbag, seatbelt, and seats. Given this level of com-
plexity, on top of the complexity of airbag and seatbelt modeling,
more tests are required for the validation of the combined, complex
model. Other test scenarios with detailed test data, e.g., offset-frontal
impacts, are needed toward a more complete validation. Given the
level of difficulty in performing full-scale crash tests, this remains
as a challenge to the full validation of a simulation model. Since the
main focus of this study was to investigate the difference between
28 N. Li et al. / Advances in Engineering Software 90 (2015) 22–40

Fig. 9. Time histories of vehicle accelerations along the longitudinal direction in the full-frontal impact. (a) at CG; (b) at rear deck; (c) on top of the engine; (d) at bottom of the
engine; (e) at cross-member of left rear seat; and (f) at cross-member of right rear seat.
 N. Li et al. / Advances in Engineering Software 90 (2015) 22–40 29

Fig. 10. Time histories of dummy accelerations along vehicle longitudinal direction in the full-frontal impact: (a) at head; (b) at chest; and (c) at pelvis.

the current safety evaluation based on vehicle responses and those
based on occupant responses, the partially validated FE model served
the purpose of identifying the difference rather than getting the
absolute occupant injury levels.
4. Occupant injury criteria
where a(t) is the head resultant acceleration in multiples of the grav-
itational acceleration (g), and t1 and t2 are two time instants with
t1 occurring before t2 . By the definition of Eq. (3), HIC depends on
both the time interval (t2 − t1 ) and acceleration history a(t). The most
commonly used HIC is HIC15 , which is calculated using an interval of
15 ms (i.e., t2 − t1 = 15 ms).
The probability of skull fracture [37] is given by

4.1. Head injury  ln (HIC)−6.96352

Skull fracture and brain injury are the primary concern of head
injury due to the high likelihood of life loss. Facial features such as
nose could also be injured but there has not been sufficient number of
studies performed. Pain and damage to the human brain are not well
understood and they are currently believed to be related to compres-
sive and shear forces induced by pressure gradients. Skull fracture has
been thoroughly studied and the injury criteria have been established
based on the tolerance curve developed at Wayne State University.
The skull can typically sustain a high acceleration for a short period
of time without being damaged. The injury criteria adopted by the
FMVSS No. 208 is the HIC [6] defined as
⎧ t 2.5 ⎫
⎨ ⎬
t1 a(t )dt
2 translational accelerations. Currently, there is no substitute criteria
HIC = Max (t2 − t1 )
⎩ (t2 − t1 ) ⎭ federal regulations.
1 0.84664
p(HIC) = √ e−t /2
2
dt (4)
2π −∞
It can be seen from Eq. (4) that the probability of skull fracture
is affected by the HIC value. For example, an HIC15 value of 700 will
result in a 31% probability of skull fracture. Thus the chance of skull
fracture is small in the case of a small HIC. An intact skull generally
provides good protection to the brain, but there is no guarantee that
brain injury would not occur even without a skull fracture. To this
end, the HIC serves as a direct measurement of skull fracture, but not
a direct measurement for brain injury. For example, the rotational ac-
celeration of the brain relative to the skull may cause brain injury
without causing skull fracture. In the absence of rotational acceler-
ations, the HIC can still be used as an assessment for the effects of
(3) that are proven better than the HIC and thus the HIC is still used in
30 N. Li et al. / Advances in Engineering Software 90 (2015) 22–40
4.2. Thorax injury
Based on cadaver tests, Eppinger et al. [38] developed the TTI cri-
terion that was defined as the average of peak chest acceleration and
peak lower spinal acceleration. According to FMVSS No. 214 side im-
pact safety evaluation, the maximum allowable TTI is 85 for a four
door vehicle and 90 for a two door vehicle. A study by Mertz et al. [39]
demonstrated that the location of the belt on the shoulder and pelvis
of the dummy influenced the chest compression and that a 40-mm
chest deflection of the Hybrid III dummy was associated with a 25%
risk of thoracic injury for belt restrained occupants. Mertz et al. [39]
developed the thoracic injury risk curves based on chest compression
responses of the Hybrid III dummy with shoulder belt loading com-
pared to car occupants in similar exposures. According to Mertz’s in-
jury risk curve for belt-restrained occupants, a 50.8 mm (2 in.) chest
compression in the Hybrid III dummy was associated with a 40% risk
of injury and a 76.2 mm (3 in.) compression was associated with a
95% risk of injury. For frontal impact tests, the FMVSS No. 208 per-
mits chest acceleration beyond 60 g for a period of less than 3 ms and
a maximum 76 mm chest compression.
4.3. Other injuries
Neck injuries occur when the neck bends exceeding the human
limit. Mertz and Patrick [40] developed the maximum acceptable
flexion and extension bending moments using sled tests conducted
on volunteers and cadaver subjects. As in most studies, tests with hu-
man volunteers only provided data up to the pain threshold, and ca-
daver tests were used to establish the limits for serious injuries. Com-
pression in the neck usually occurs in rollover accidents in which the
body weight is applied to the head via neck. Based on measurements
made with Hybrid III dummy under impacts of a tackling block that
was reported to cause serious head and neck injuries among Ameri-
can football players, Mertz et al. [39] investigated the neck responses
and established a maximum value of 4-kN for axial compressive neck
loading. The current tolerance levels, 3.3-kN for tension and 3-kN for
shear, were developed by Nyquist et al. [8]. They used a Hybrid III 50%
male dummy with a three-point belt to reconstruct real-world colli-
sions and correlated test results with occupants’ field injuries. In a
frontal impact, the loads on knees along the femur bone could cause
dislocation of the hip. With the wide usage of lap belt, the number
of pelvis injuries in frontal crashes is largely reduced and pelvis in-
juries are more often seen in side crashes. In FMVSS No. 208, there is
no direct criterion established for pelvis injuries in frontal impact. For
Table 1
Impact severity levels.
Impact severity levels Index values
A ASI ≤ 1.0
B ASI ≤ 1.4 and THIV ≤ 33 km/h (9.17 m/s)
C ASI ≤ 1.9
(averaged over a moving 50-ms time interval) to the vehicle as a mea-
sure of impact severity. Currently, the impact severity and injury eval-
uation for most roadside barriers are based on the flail space model
[42] adopted by MASH. Because there is no real occupant or crash test
dummy used, a hypothetical occupant is assumed at the vehicle’s CG
location and “to be propelled through the vehicle compartment (flail
space); to strike the instrument panel, windshield, or side door; and
to subsequently ride down the remaining part of the collision event
in contact with the vehicle.”
Fig. 11a shows the definition of flail space (a 0.6 × 0.6 m square
box) in MASH and the occupant impacting the vehicle interior. Af-
ter initial contact, the occupant is assumed to remain in contact with
the vehicle and have the same acceleration as that at the vehicle CG
point. Impact severity and occupant risks are evaluated two parame-
ters: (a) occupant impact velocity (OIV), which is the relative veloc-
ity between the hypothetical occupant and the instrument panel; and
(b) occupant ridedown acceleration (ORA), which is the largest 10-ms
average accelerations of the hypothetical occupant during the sub-
sequent ridedown. Although MASH specifies a preferred maximum
value of 9.1 m/s for OIV and 15.0 g for ORA, the OIV of 12.20 m/s and
the ORA of 20.49 g are also acceptable. In case of relatively small ve-
hicle accelerations and/or very short durations, the occupant impact
velocity will be set equal to the vehicle’s change in velocity prior and
after impacting the barrier. Such impacts, e.g. an impact at 50 km/h
and 15° angle, are usually not severe and the OIV and ORA are not
evaluated.
The European Committee for Normalization (CEN) adopted the
theoretical head impact velocity (THIV), post-impact head decelera-
tion (PHD), and acceleration severity index (ASI) as measures of occu-
pant risk. These criteria are recommended but not required in MASH.
The concept of THIV, as shown in Fig. 11b, is similar to OIV but also
considers yaw motion of the vehicle in calculation and uses a differ-
ent size of the vehicle interior (a 1.2 × 0.6 m rectangular box). The
PHD is the maximum value of the resultant acceleration filtered by
a Butterworth low-pass filter with a cut-off frequency of 10 Hz and
averaged over a moving 10-ms time period. The ASI is defined as
side impacts, the maximum allowable acceleration on pelvis is 130 g. 
2 
2 
2  12
Injuries of the lower extremities (i.e., legs, knees, ankles and feet) are
often overlooked since they are normally not life threatening. Cur-
rently, femur injury criterion is the only lower limb measure that is
used in FMVSS, which allows a maximum force of 10-kN on the fe-
mur bones. Load levels within this limit are considered safe without
causing pelvis injuries. This criterion served as an indirect criterion
for pelvis injury and does not address any potential injuries below
the knee, though those injuries are frequent and often result in dis-
abilities.
5. Occupant injury criteria based on vehicle responses
Crash test dummies have not been adopted in crash testing of
roadside safety devices; state-of-the-art occupant safety is evaluated
primarily by examining vehicle responses such as vehicle trajectory
and kinetic energy. Occupant injury risk is believed to be affected by
impact severity and estimated using criteria developed based on ve-
hicular responses. The severity of an impact may be quantified by im-
pact force, impact velocity, and acceleration, etc. For example, Coun-
cil and Stewart [41] used peak longitudinal and lateral impact forces
āx āy āz
ASI(t ) = + + (5)
âx ây âz
where āx , ay , āz are the 50-ms average vehicle accelerations and
âx , ây , âz are the threshold accelerations (âx = 12 g, ây = 9 g, and
âz = 10 g). Normally the maximum value of ASI(t) is taken as the sin-
gle index and the more ASI exceeds unity, the larger the occupant
risk to injury. Using ASI and THIV together, the CEN defined three im-
pact severity levels/classes: A, B and C as shown in Table 1. According
to CEN, impact severity at level A offers a greater level of safety to
the occupant than level B, and level B has a greater safety level than
level C [43]. The PHD is not used by CEN in evaluating occupant injury
probability and barrier safety performances.
6. Numerical simulations results and discussion
The New Jersey concrete barrier and the G4 (1s) W-beam guardrail
were used in the evaluation of dummy responses in roadside crash
simulations. In the simulations of the vehicle impacting the concrete
barrier, four impact speeds and four impact angles were considered,
 N. Li et al. / Advances in Engineering Software 90 (2015) 22–40
Fig. 11. Illustration of the injury concepts: (a) OIV and (b) THIV.
Fig. 12. Definition of yaw, pitch, and roll angles.
resulting in a total of 16 (4 × 4) simulations. The four impact speeds
were 50 km/h (31.1 mph), 70 km/h (43.5 mph), 100 km/h (62.1 mph)
and 120 km/h (74.6 mph), and the four impact angles were 15° , 20° ,
25° and 30° . In the simulations of the vehicle impacting the W-beam
guardrail, four impact speeds and three impact angles were consid-
ered, resulting in a total of 12 (4 × 3) simulations. The four impact
speeds were the same as those for the concrete barrier and the three
impact angles were 20° , 25° and 30° .
In this section, the vehicular responses were first obtained and
analyzed. Occupant injuries based on vehicular responses and crash
dummy responses were then obtained, and finally the two types of
criteria were analyzed on their correlations.
6.1. Vehicular and occupant responses in roadside barrier crashes
Vehicular responses in roadside barrier crashes are typically used
to evaluate the impact performances of roadside barrier systems,
such as the vehicular kinematics and dynamics, and integrity of road-
side barriers. Major evaluation criteria for vehicular responses speci-
fied in MASH include: (a) the vehicle should be redirected by the bar-
rier, i.e. the vehicle should not be allowed to override or underride
the barrier; (b) vehicle should stay upright during the impact, which
was met by requiring its pitch and roll angles below 75° ; and (c) post-
impact vehicle preferably does not intrude into adjacent traffic lanes;
this is measured by the exit angle (i.e., the angle between the bar-
rier’s longitudinal direction and vehicle traveling direction at time of
the vehicle losing contact with the barrier).
31
Fig. 13. Snapshots of Ford F250 impacting a concrete barrier (100 km/h; 25° ): (a) initial
engagement; (b) disengagement; and (c) re-engagement.
The yaw, pitch, and roll angles of the vehicle (see Fig. 12) were
used to examine the vehicle’s orientation and stability in a crash
event. The yaw angle indicated how much the vehicle was redirected,
and the pitch and roll angles could be used to assess the stability of
the vehicle during the crash. Table 2 gives the maximum pitch and roll
angles of all 16 simulations of vehicle impacting the concrete barrier.
It can be seen that all the pitch and roll angles were acceptable except
for the case with an impact speed of 100 km/h and a 30° impact an-
gle. As for the post-impact responses, it is important for the vehicle
not intruding into adjacent traffic lanes after being redirected by the
barrier. One measure of the vehicle’s post-impact response is the exit
angle, which is defined as the angle between the barrier’s longitudi-
nal direction and the vehicle’s travel direction at the time when the
vehicle loses contact with the barrier. The preferred exit angle should
be less than 60% of the initial impact angle as specified by MASH. The
exit angles from simulation results of all cases of the vehicle impact-
ing the concrete barrier are shown in Table 2. There were three cases
identified with exit angles exceeding the preferred maximum value:
(1) at an impact speed of 70 km/h and a 15° impact angle; (2) at an
impact speed of 100 km/h and a 15° impact angle; and (3) at an im-
pact speed of 100 km/h and a 30° impact angle. A higher exit angle
was not encouraged since it implied a higher likelihood that the ve-
hicle rebounding back into the traffic lanes and exposed to secondary
impacts.
Fig. 13 shows the simulation results of the vehicle impacting the
concrete barrier with an impact speed of 100 km/h and at a 25° an-
gle, which is the standard test condition specified by MASH. In this
oblique impact, the front-left corner of the truck was the first to
32 N. Li et al. / Advances in Engineering Software 90 (2015) 22–40

Table 2
The maximum pitch, roll and exit angles of Ford F250 impacting a concrete barrier.

Impact angle Pitch angle Roll angle Exit angle

Impact speed (km/h) Impact speed (km/h) Impact speed (km/h)

50 70 100 120 50 70 100 120 50 70 100 120

15° 4.00° 6.27° 4.61° 6.30° 10.4° 26.1° 46.7° 50.0° 4.27° 9.94° 9.46° 6.19°
20° 5.80° 7.13° 8.59° 4.71° 15.2° 32.6° 52.6° 59.6° 9.06° 8.20° 8.19° 10.4°
25° 6.70° 8.20° 4.74° 5.46° 11.2° 32.6° 56.0° 65.7° 13.4° 11.6° 13.4° 13.6°
30° 6.38° 7.31° 9.58° 11.5° 13.9° 49.2° 107° 71.1° 17.4° 16.8° 20.4° 13.1°

Fig. 14. Dummy head impacting the driver side window: (a) side view; (b) top view; (c) front-side view; and (d) backside view.

contact the barrier, resulting in a lift of the vehicle by the slope at
the base of the barrier (see Fig. 13a). The truck was then in contact
with the barrier on its left side (Fig. 13b) and was finally redirected
(Fig. 13c). In this case, the 2006 Ford F250 was safely redirected and
stayed upright during the impact, with an exit angle of 13.35° that
met the MASH requirement. Deformation of the vehicle was local and
mainly in the left-front corner. The vehicle compartment was intact
and thus imposed no harm to the occupant.
Occupant responses are rarely evaluated in real-world crash test-
ing but can be closely evaluated in simulations. In the aforemen-
tioned case, the airbag installed on the steering wheel deployed at
40 ms but had no contact with the dummy and due to the sideways
movement of the dummy (see Fig. 14). The contact force between the
dummy and airbag is therefore zero during the impact. It is also ob-
served that the dummy’s head impacted the driver-side window, re-
sulting in an acute increase in head acceleration to 100 g at approxi-
mately 0.12 s. The examination of acceleration histories of each part
of the dummy showed that the maximum acceleration occurred in
the head.
Table 3 summarizes the maximum pitch, roll, and exit angles of a
Ford F250 impacting the W-beam guardrail. It can be seen that most
of the impact cases had very small pitch and roll angles, except for the
impact at 120 km/h and at a 30° impact angle in which the maximum
roll angle was 30.9° . In all of the simulated impacts, the pickup truck
was shown to have maintained an upright position and thus was sta-
ble for the entire impact duration. It was also observed that the vehi-
cle was not safely/smoothly redirected in all impact cases due to ve-
hicle snagging caused by the rail and/or post going behind the wheel
and getting entangled (see Fig. 15a). As a result of the entanglement,
the vehicle spun around guardrail rather than being smoothly redi-
rected (see Fig. 15b). This is also shown by the negative exit angles
given in Table 3. In cases where the vehicle was still in contact with
the guardrail at the end of the simulation, the exit angle was not cal-
culated.
Similar to the cases of concrete barrier crash, the maximum ac-
celeration occurred in the dummy’s head, but the maximum value
was less than 25 g and thus much smaller than the maximum accel-
eration in the case of impacting the concrete barrier. In the case of
 N. Li et al. / Advances in Engineering Software 90 (2015) 22–40 33

Table 3
The maximum pitch, roll and exit angles of Ford F250 impacting a W-beam guardrail.

Impact angle Pitch angle Roll angle Exit angle

Impact speed (km/h) Impact speed (km/h) Impact speed (km/h)

50 70 100 120 50 70 100 120 50 70 100 120

20° 2.95° 32.5° 6.40° 26.2° 4.70° 6.31° 8.37° 24.6° -8° – – –
25° 1.97° 3.93° 4.05° 19.1° 2.82° 5.81° 10.4° 6.32° −12° −17° – –
30° 3.47° 5.48° 6.88° 4.45° 3.06° 7.95° 10.8° 30.9° −45° −60° −40° –

Table 6
The CEN impact severity levels of Ford F250 impacting a concrete barrier
and a W-beam guardrail.

Impact angle Concrete barrier W-beam guardrail

Impact speed (km/h) Impact speed (km/h)

50 70 100 120 50 70 100 120

°
15 A A B B – – – –
20° A A B D A A A D
25° A A D D A A A B
30° A D D D A A A –

each impact case, varying from 0.50 to 1.99 m. Since larger deflec-
tions often imply more severe impacts, the maximum deflection was
Fig. 15. Ford F250 impacting and spinning away from a W-beam barrier: (a) isometric increased with the increasing of impact speed and impact angle.
view and (b) top view.

Table 4
6.2. Evaluation of occupant injuries using vehicle responses
Maximum deflection of W-beam barrier impacted
by Ford F250 (unit in m). Two major vehicular responses, the OIV and ORA, are recom-
Impact angle Impact speed (km/h)
mended by MASH for evaluating occupant injuries in the crash test-
ing of longitudinal barriers (note that there is no dummy used in
50 70 100 120
these tests). Table 5 shows the x- and y-direction OIVs and ORAs of
20°
0.50 0.78 1.15 1.58 the Ford F250 in the impacts into the concrete barrier. The x- and
25° 0.60 0.95 1.70 1.91 y-directions are the longitudinal and transverse directions of the bar-
30° 0.82 1.26 1.99 2.47 rier, respectively. According to MASH, the OIVs and ORAs of all these
impacts were all acceptable. As a comparison, the impact severity lev-
els adopted by CEN were also determined for the impacts into the
the W-beam guardrail, the head did not hit the airbag or the drier- concrete barrier, as shown in Table 6. It was found that in six impact
side window; so the peak acceleration was mainly due to the neck cases the occupant risk was unacceptably high (i.e., Level D). This re-
constraint. Since the W-beam guardrail was flexible and allowed for vealed some inconsistencies between the two most commonly used
transverse deflections, the vehicle’s kinetic energy was largely ab- guidelines for evaluating roadside barrier performance.
sorbed by the guardrail and the impact severity was reduced. The Similarly, the CEN impact severity levels for impacts into the
flexibility of the guardrail could be measured from its original (i.e., W-beam guardrail were obtained and given in Table 6. In one of
undeformed) location to the current (i.e., deformed) location, as these impact cases, the occupant risks were unacceptably high (i.e.,
shown in Fig. 16. Table 4 gives the maximum W-beam deflection for Level D). In the impact at 120 km/h and a 30° angle, the pickup

Fig. 16. Deflection of a W-beam barrier.

Table 5
The OIV and ORA values of Ford F250 impacting a concrete barrier.

Impact angle OIVx /OIVy (m/s) ORAx /ORAy (g)

Impact speed (km/h) Impact speed (km/h)

50 70 100 120 50 70 100 120

15° – 1.61/1.88 2.39/1.63 3.13/1.73 – 0.66/0.27 1.96/0.63 0.96/1.61

20° 1.89/1.06 2.32/0.21 3.26/0.90 4.36/1.01 0.96/2.02 0.87/4.77 2.27/4.34 0.90/1.02
25° 2.68/3.21 3.89/3.70 5.45/4.11 6.84/3.76 0.44/3.88 2.25/3.70 2.69/7.91 3.12/8.13
30° 4.06/4.19 5.86/5.04 7.92/5.58 9.32/5.88 1.71/1.61 2.31/4.38 2.56/5.60 4.77/7.68
34 N. Li et al. / Advances in Engineering Software 90 (2015) 22–40

Table 7
The OIV and ORA values of Ford F250 impacting W-beam guardrail.

Impact angle OIVx /OIVy (m/s) ORAx /ORAy (g)

Impact speed (km/h) Impact speed (km/h)

50 70 100 120 50 70 100 120

15° 5.22/1.55 6.40/1.46 7.48/2.40 8.86/2.29 – – – –

20° 6.03/2.20 7.31/2.32 8.16/2.38 8.29/2.69 1.59/2.10 2.33/2.93 7.26/2.40 11.5/7.89
25° 6.80/2.06 8.66/2.17 8.15/2.75 – 2.76/0.83 1.68/1.74 4.54/2.93 3.54/3.31
30° 5.22/1.55 6.40/1.46 7.48/2.40 8.86/2.29 7.58/0.52 5.19/2.88 5.24/2.22 –

Table 8 the concrete barrier, two cases were found to fail the HIC15 criteria
The HIC15 of crash dummy during a Ford F250 impacting a concrete barrier and a
(i.e., HIC15 > 700): at impact speeds of 100 km/h and 120 km/h, both
W-beam guardrail.
at a 30° impact angle. Recall that the CEN impact severity levels in
Impact angle Concrete barrier W-beam guardrail Table 6 indicated four other cases with severe occupant injuries in
Impact speed (km/h) Impact speed (km/h)
addition to the above two cases. This suggested that the CEN stan-
50 70 100 120 50 70 100 120 dards were more conservative than the HIC15 with a 700 threshold
°
value on injury evaluation in median barrier crashes. On the other
15 6 9 150 183 – – – –
20° 12 61 242 343 10 9 44 110 hand, the MASH OIV and ORA values in the impacts into the concrete
25° 31 173 516 661 5 17 32 1442 barrier did not indicate any unacceptable occupant risks; this sug-
30° 169 358 841 1529 11 18 19 18 gested that the injury criteria by MASH might not fully capture the
occupant injury risks in vehicular crashes into a concrete barrier.
In the impacts into the W-beam guardrail, all the HIC15 values
truck overrode the guardrail and thus was considered unsafe; the were below the 700 threshold except for the case with an impact
evaluation of occupant injury was unnecessary. The OIVs and ORAs of speed of 120 km/h and a 25° impact angle, which had an HIC15 of
the Ford F250 impacting the W-beam guardrail were calculated and 1442. This unacceptable high HIC15 was caused by the high accelera-
given in Table 7. According to MASH requirement on OIVs and ORAs, tions in the dummy head that impacted the driver side window. Ac-
the W-beam guardrail did not exhibit any unacceptable occupant cording to the CEN impact severity levels in Table 6, this impact case
risk in all of these impacts. This evaluation, once again, contradicted had an acceptable impact severity level, i.e., Level B. In addition, the
to the CEN evaluation of the W-beam guardrail on impact severity. OIV and ORA values of this case (see Table 7) were all considered safe
Comparing to the results of the concrete barrier under impacts of by MASH. These inconsistencies implied the necessity of consider-
the Ford F250, it can be seen that the W-beam guardrail had lower ing crash test dummy responses in the injury evaluation and barrier
impact severity than the concrete barrier due to the guardrail’s performance assessment, since only such responses and the corre-
flexibility and energy absorption feature during impacts. sponding injury criteria could identify severe impacts and injuries on
the occupant head, such as the HIC15 criteria. In the next section, the
correlations of injury criteria based on dummy responses and those
6.3. Evaluation of occupant injuries using dummy responses based on vehicle responses are assessed and presented.

Impact severity estimations based on vehicular responses, such as
the ASI, OIV, ORA, THIV and PHD, may not necessarily be good indica-
tions of the occupant injury risk. These criteria only utilize vehicle re-
sponses, particularly the vehicle CG accelerations; they neither con-
sider the effects of restraint systems nor can differentiate restraint
systems from one to another. For example, if the ASI values are the
same, the risk of occupant injury will be considered the same regard-
less of the types of restraint systems. This is certainly not the case
for real world crashes. Furthermore, occupant injuries are different at
different locations/parts of the body such as head, neck, chest, pelvis,
and legs. Each body part has its own form of injury and thus should
have its own threshold values for the specific type of injury. None
of these can be indicated by the injury criteria based on vehicle re-
sponses such as OIV, ORA, THIV, PHD and ASI. These criteria are at
best approximate assessments of the injury at the whole body level.
With the aid of numerical modeling, specifically the FE analy-
sis, crash tests of roadside barriers can now be simulated with crash
test dummies incorporated into the model. Using these models, a di-
rect injury evaluation can be performed based on dummy responses
rather than vehicle responses. For example, occupant risk criteria
such as HIC and the maximum chest compression (MCC), which are
typically used in frontal impact tests, can be calculated for vehicular
impacts into the concrete barrier as well as the W-beam guardrail.
According to NHTSA specifications, the HIC15 should be less than 700
and MCC should fall below 76 mm.
The HIC15 values of the Ford F250 impacting both the concrete
barrier and W-beam guardrail were calculated using accelerations on
the head of the crash dummy, as shown in Table 8. In the impacts into
6.4. Correlations of occupant injury criteria based on vehicle responses
and dummy responses
Despite the strong needs to incorporate occupant injury risks in
the design and evaluation of roadside barriers, using a crash test
dummy in barrier testing has not been set as a requirement in the
current standard (i.e., MASH and CEN). This is due to the complex-
ity of crash testing setup and instrumentation even without the crash
test dummy. Nevertheless, a good understanding of the correlation
between vehicle responses and occupant injury risks would help im-
prove the barrier designs under current situation as well as provide
useful information to update the current standards. With the lack
of crash test dummy in the physical testing, this task can be best
achieved using computer modeling and simulations. In the work of
Council and Stewart [41], they studied the relationship between oc-
cupant injury and the peak longitudinal and lateral impact forces on
the vehicle averaged over a 50-ms time interval. The results of the
study did not indicate any strong correlation between the two re-
sponses. Ray et al. [44] investigated the correlation of OIV to HIC15
using test data of three sled tests; their results led to an update to the
NCHRP Report 350 to increase the maximum lateral OIV from 9 m/s
to 12 m/s. Shojaati [45] studied the results of nine sled tests and sug-
gested using an exponential function to describe the relationship be-
tween HIC15 and ASI.
In this study, the correlations between injury criteria based on
crash dummy responses (i.e., HIC15 and MCC) and those based on ve-
hicular responses (i.e., ASI, THIV, PHD, OIV and ORA) were studied for
vehicular impacts into the concrete barrier and W-beam guardrail.
 N. Li et al. / Advances in Engineering Software 90 (2015) 22–40 35

Fig. 17. Correlation of HIC15 with vehicle response based criteria in the impacts into a concrete barrier: (a) ASI; (b) THIV; (c) PHD; (d) OIVx ; (e) OIVy ; (f) ORAx ; and (g) ORAy .
36 N. Li et al. / Advances in Engineering Software 90 (2015) 22–40

Fig. 18. Correlation of MCC with vehicle response based criteria in the impacts into a concrete barrier: (a) ASI; (b) THIV; (c) PHD; (d) OIVx ; (e) OIVy ; (f) ORAx ; and (g) ORAy .
 N. Li et al. / Advances in Engineering Software 90 (2015) 22–40 37

Fig. 19. Correlation of HIC15 with vehicle response based criteria in the impacts into a W-beam guardrail: (a) ASI; (b) THIV; (c) PHD; (d) OIVx ; (e) OIVy ; (f) ORAx ; and (g) ORAy .
38 N. Li et al. / Advances in Engineering Software 90 (2015) 22–40

Fig. 20. Correlation of MCC with vehicle response based criteria in the impacts into a W-beam guardrail: (a) ASI; (b) THIV; (c) PHD; (d) OIVx ; (e) OIVy ; (f) ORAx ; and (g) ORAy .
 N. Li et al. / Advances in Engineering Software 90 (2015) 22–40 39

Table 9
Correlation of HIC15 and MCC with OIV, ORA, ASI, THIV and PHD in concrete barrier impacts.

Other criteria HIC15 MCC

f(x) = a0 x2 + b0 x + c0 f(x) = a1 xk R2 f(x) = a0 x2 + b0 x + c0 f(x) = a1 xk R2

a0 b0 c0 a1 k a0 b0 c0 a1 k

ASI 247.7 −131.8 25.22 – – 0.98 – – – 11.41 0.72 0.46

THIV – – – 0.017 4.35 0.95 – – – 1.16 1.14 0.60
PHD – – – 0.016 4.41 0.69 0.0266 0.82 5.08 – – 0.28
OIVx 22.21 −66.72 113.9 – – 0.96 – – – 6.02 0.59 0.47
OIVy 71.26 −281.5 340.1 – – 0.70 0.57 −1.72 12.77 – – 0.37
ORAx 72.02 −31.81 63.41 – – 0.87 0 3.59 7.65 – – 0.49
ORAy 21.32 −53.51 157.7 – – 0.60 – – – 9.42 0.36 0.57

Table 10
Correlation of HIC15 and MCC with OIV, ORA, ASI, THIV and PHD in W-beam guardrail impacts.

Other criteria HIC15 MCC

f(x) = a1 xk f(x) = a2 emx R2 f(x) = a1 xk R2

a1 k a2 m a1 k

ASI – – 1.8618 3.4556 0.91 24.939 0.9421 0.81

THIV 0.0055 3.9465 – – 0.54 0.1468 2.2655 0.92
PHD – – 1.887 0.2666 0.67 2.8086 0.8128 0.68
OIVx – – 0.2924 0.5669 0.58 0.2062 2.1993 0.87
OIVy 3.7961 2.0973 – – 0.22 5.9978 1.2968 0.40
ORAx 5.1749 0.8991 – – 0.46 9.0331 0.4283 0.48
ORAy 9.5666 0.8839 – – 0.54 12.387 0.3619 0.43

For OIV and ORA, the correlations were studied on their longitudi-
nal components (i.e., OIVx and ORAx ) and lateral components (OIVy
and ORAy ). Table 9 shows the correlations of HIC15 and MCC with the
other seven criteria in the cases of impacting the concrete barrier.
For HIC15 , a regression function is first created for each of the seven
criteria using a quadratic polynomial, which may be replaced by a
power-law function if the polynomial function does not have a good
R-square value. If both the polynomial and power-law functions do
not have good R-square values, the one with higher R-square value is
presented in Table 9. The same procedure was applied to MCC; the
coefficients of correlation functions and corresponding R-square val-
ues are shown in Table 9.
It can be seen from the results in Table 9 and Fig. 17 that HIC15
correlated well with ASI, THIV and OIVx , but correlated poorly with
PHD, OIVy , ORAx and ORAy . This indicated that ASI, THIV, and OIVx
could be used to calculate the HIC15 value and determine the cor-
responding occupant injury risk using the correlation functions. The
MCC was shown to have poor correlations with all the seven vehicle
response based criteria. This was as expected because the vehicle re-
sponses were mainly accelerations obtained on locations not even on
the passenger restraint systems.
For vehicular impacts into the W-beam guardrail, the corrections
of HIC15 and MCC with the seven vehicle response based criteria
were also obtained and the coefficients of correlation function and
R-square values are shown in Table 10. In these cases, the quadratic
polynomial functions gave poor R-square values and thus an expo-
nential function was adopted in addition to the power-law func-
tion. The coefficients of the functions with better R-square values are
shown in Table 10. Fig. 19 shows the correlations between HIC15 and
the seven vehicle response based criteria, and Fig. 20 shows the cor-
relation between MCC and the seven criteria.
For the case with an impact speed of 120 km/h and a 25° angle,
the HIC15 value was abnormally high compared to the cases with
120 km/h at 20° and 30° angles. Thus this case was considered an
outlier and was excluded from the correlation analysis. As shown by
the results in Table 10, there were no strong correlations found be-
tween the HIC15 and all vehicle response based injury criteria except
for ASI (see Fig. 19a). It was also observed from Table 10 that the
MCC only had a good correlation with THIV (see Fig. 20b), but had
no strong correlations with all other vehicle responses based injury
criteria (i.e., ASI, PHD, OIV, and ORA). Compared to the cases of vehic-
ular impacts into concrete barriers, the correlations between HIC15
and MCC with vehicle response based criteria were generally weak
in the cases of W-beam guardrail. This was due to the large guardrail
displacements and deformations during the impacts, in addition to
the complicated vehicle-guardrail contacts and interactions. To this
end, full-scale crash tests incorporated with crash test dummies are
recommended so as to obtain and use occupant responses in the de-
sign and evaluation of longitudinal barriers.
7. Concluding remarks
In this study, a numerical study was performed to address occu-
pant responses and injury risks in the evaluation of roadside barrier
safety performance. The finite element models of a Hybrid III crash
test dummy and the passive restraint system including airbag, seat-
belt, steering column and dashboard were improved using crash test
data and incorporated into a 2006 Ford pickup truck model for sim-
ulations of roadside barrier crashes. The integrated model was vali-
dated by comparing to published experimental data and was shown
to have improved numerical stability and accuracy in predicting im-
pact forces and acceleration histories. Crash simulations were then
performed on two longitudinal barrier systems: a rigid concrete bar-
rier and a semi-rigid W-beam guardrail. Both the vehicle and occu-
pant responses were extracted from simulation results and occupant
injuries were evaluated using criteria based on vehicular responses
(i.e., ASI, THIV, PHD, OIV, and ORA) and using those based on dummy
responses (i.e., HIC and MCC). Discrepancy was observed on occupant
injuries based on the two types of criteria. For example, some crash
tests with OIV and/or ORA values below the MASH thresholds had
unacceptably high HIC15 values. Among vehicle response based crite-
ria, discrepancy was also found between the CEN and MASH criteria.
While the MASH criteria (i.e., OIV and ORA) may underestimate the
occupant injury risk, the CEN criteria (i.e., ASI, THIV, and PHD) may
overestimate the injury risks. To this end, an accurate assessment of
40 N. Li et al. / Advances in Engineering Software 90 (2015) 22–40
occupant injury should be directly based on occupant responses in
addition to vehicular responses.
A correlation study was also performed on occupant injury cri-
teria based on dummy responses, specifically the HIC15 and MCC,
with those based on vehicular responses (i.e., ASI, THIV, PHD, OIV,
and ORA) for both the concrete barrier and W-beam guardrail crash
cases. While a good correlation was found between HIC15 and the ASI,
THIV, and OIVx in the impacts into concrete barrier, no good corre-
lation is found between HIC15 and other criteria and between MCC
and all vehicle response based criteria. For impacts into the W-beam
guardrail, good correlation was only found between HIC15 and THIV
and between MCC with ASI. The lack of generally good correlations
between the two types of criteria indicated the need of incorporating
occupant responses in the design and evaluation of roadside barrier
systems. It should be noted that the numerical simulation results and
observations from this study should not be taken as definitive con-
clusions. Full-scale crash tests incorporated with crash test dummies
are recommended to verify the numerical results and further validate
the simulation models. Nevertheless, the discrepancies observed in
this study between criteria based on occupant responses and those
based on vehicular responses reinforce the needs to use o ccupant re-
sponses directly in the evaluation of safety performance of roadside
barrier systems.
Acknowledgments
The authors acknowledge the support of the North Carolina De-
partment of Transportation (NCDOT) under Project NCDOT RP 2009-
04 and RP 2011-09.
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