Vehicle occupants involved in automobile side impact crashes are three times more likely
to experience head injuries than occupants involved in frontal or other types of collisions. The
most frequent contact source for an occupant in side impact crashes is the side window. In side
impacts, failure of the side window glass affects the potential for the occupant head injury.
Tempered glass in side window is easily shattered by exposing the occupant head into
environment, where it can be directly impacted by the intruding or striking vehicle. In order to
reduce the injury potential for occupant head in a collision, windows with laminated glass have
been developed, which are gradually replacing the tempered glass. This study is mainly focused
on understanding the dynamic response of the human head in side impact scenarios, when the
tempered glass in the side windows is replaced with laminated glass.
Quasi-static experiments are performed in this study with a free-motion headform
impacting a laminated glass. The laminated glass is composed of two layers of glass separated by
Polyvinyl Butyral (PVB) interlayer. A Finite Element (FE) model of the laminated glass window
is created and impacted with the FE headform at the same velocity as in the experiment, and the
model is validated against experimental results. The properties of validated glass model are
implemented into the side windows of a small car model to determine the performance of
laminated glass in a typical side impact scenario. The responses of the occupant with the
tempered and laminated glazing with and without restraints are compared. Based on the
performance of the laminated glazing in side impact scenario, the laminated glass has shown to
reduce the possibility of failure of the glass and thus contains the occupant from ejecting with
virtually no change in injury potential values. / Thesis (M.S.)--Wichita State University, College of Engineering, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:WICHITA/oai:soar.wichita.edu:10057/3987 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Vemuri, Lavanya |
| Contributors | Lankarani, Hamid M. |
| Publisher | Wichita State University |
| Source Sets | Wichita State University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | xvi, 92 p. |
| Rights | © Copyright 2011 by Lavanya Vemuri. All rights reserved |
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