A Thesis submitted to The University of Arizona College of Medicine - Phoenix in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Medicine. / Motor vehicle accidents involving pedestrians are some of the most common and lethal forms of injury for children in the United States. Among younger children, a common mechanism of action for severe trauma is when a vehicle runs over the child in a forward or backward motion at low speed resulting in a blunt crush injury. This typically occurs in non‐traffic settings including driveways, sidewalks, and roadways. Such incidents have been referred to in many different ways in the literature but for the purposes of this paper will be referred to as low speed vehicle run‐overs. This is a retrospective chart review carried out at Phoenix Children’s Hospital in affiliation with the University of Arizona College of Medicine‐Phoenix that categorizes and examines the injuries sustained by patients involved in low speed vehicle runovers occurring between December 2007 and August 2013. Fifty‐five pediatric patients were included with a median age of 24 months and 6 of these patients were fatally injured. Internal injuries were common overall and significantly more common in children ≤24months. Over half of the cohort sustained fractures, with a 24% incidence of skull fractures. All fatalities were the result of traumatic brain injury. Twenty percent of victims required operative intervention. It was concluded that the severity of these types of incidents varies from minimal to life threatening and best care requires close and thorough evaluation by the trauma and emergency department teams.

O presente trabalho visa o estudo e avaliação de diversos modelos de falha através de ensaios experimentais e análises numéricas. A caracterização do material foi feita por meio de ensaios de tração de espécimes com e sem entalhe e de cisalhamento, para prover dados em uma ampla faixa de triaxialidade. A calibração dos parâmetros necessários para cada modelo de falha ocorreu através da obtenção das componentes de tensões e de deformações na região de ruptura, obtidas por meio de análises numéricas destes ensaios. O critério da máxima deformação plástica equivalente, modelo de dano de Johnson-Cook e critério da máxima tensão cisalhante foram aplicados em um caso de impacto em pára-choque. Diversos ensaios de impacto foram realizados até a que se atingisse a ruptura satisfatória do componente. Os ensaios foram modelados em elementos finitos, através do programa comercial LS-Dyna®, sendo que os modelos de falha calibrados foram aplicados para o ensaio onde se ocorreu ruptura. Houve boa concordância entre os resultados obtidos numericamente e experimentalmente, respeitadas as observações realizadas acerca da especificidade deste caso de impacto em baixa velocidade. / The aim of the present work is an assessment of several fracture models through experiments and numerical simulations. Tensile tests with notched and unnotched specimens were carried out to provide the material characterization in a wide range of stress triaxiality. The calibration of the parameters required by the fracture models was enabled by the parallel numerical simulation of the tensile tests, providing information on the stress and strain components at the failure locus. The constant equivalent strain criterion, the Johnson-Cook failure model and the maximum shear stress failure criterion were applied in a bumper beam impact case study. Several low speed impact tests were carried out in order to result in the components rupture. Numerical simulation of the experiments was performed using commercial finite element code LS-Dyna®. Good correlation of experiments and numerical simulations was achieved when considering this particular low speed case study.

O presente trabalho visa o estudo e avaliação de diversos modelos de falha através de ensaios experimentais e análises numéricas. A caracterização do material foi feita por meio de ensaios de tração de espécimes com e sem entalhe e de cisalhamento, para prover dados em uma ampla faixa de triaxialidade. A calibração dos parâmetros necessários para cada modelo de falha ocorreu através da obtenção das componentes de tensões e de deformações na região de ruptura, obtidas por meio de análises numéricas destes ensaios. O critério da máxima deformação plástica equivalente, modelo de dano de Johnson-Cook e critério da máxima tensão cisalhante foram aplicados em um caso de impacto em pára-choque. Diversos ensaios de impacto foram realizados até a que se atingisse a ruptura satisfatória do componente. Os ensaios foram modelados em elementos finitos, através do programa comercial LS-Dyna®, sendo que os modelos de falha calibrados foram aplicados para o ensaio onde se ocorreu ruptura. Houve boa concordância entre os resultados obtidos numericamente e experimentalmente, respeitadas as observações realizadas acerca da especificidade deste caso de impacto em baixa velocidade. / The aim of the present work is an assessment of several fracture models through experiments and numerical simulations. Tensile tests with notched and unnotched specimens were carried out to provide the material characterization in a wide range of stress triaxiality. The calibration of the parameters required by the fracture models was enabled by the parallel numerical simulation of the tensile tests, providing information on the stress and strain components at the failure locus. The constant equivalent strain criterion, the Johnson-Cook failure model and the maximum shear stress failure criterion were applied in a bumper beam impact case study. Several low speed impact tests were carried out in order to result in the components rupture. Numerical simulation of the experiments was performed using commercial finite element code LS-Dyna®. Good correlation of experiments and numerical simulations was achieved when considering this particular low speed case study.

The diploma thesis deals with basic test procedures conducted by companies Euro NCAP and RCAR. It focuses mainly on insurance impact and describes the creation of a model, simulation and crash on barrier. Moreover, it explores the influence of change of yield strength, thickness and hardening of material of energy-absorber on simulation of insurance impact, especially the amount of absorbed energy by energy-absorber.

The diploma thesis deals especially with basic crash test conducted by the organizations Euro NCAP and RCAR. On basis of RCAR standard for low speed crash test is designed crush element for a car Ford Taurus by using a virtual simulation. Thesis describes the selection, editing, and creating a finite element model and impact simulation to the barrier. The purpose was use a real vehicle, design into it a new crush element, try different shape and material implementation of crush element and make their comparison.