Study of Vehicle-Based Metrics for Assessing the Severity of Side Impacts

A research program has been launched in Iran to develop an evaluation method for comparing the safety performance of vehicles in real-world collisions with crash test results. The goal of this research program is to flag vehicle models whose safety performance in real-world accidents does not match their crash test results. As part of this research program, a metric is needed to evaluate the severity of side impacts in crash tests and real-world accidents. In this work, several vehicle-based metrics were analyzed and calculated for a dataset of more than 500 side impact tests from the NHTSA crash test database. The correlation between the metric values and the dummy injury criteria was studied to find the most appropriate metric with the strongest correlation coefficient values with the dummy injury criteria. Delta-V and a newly created metric $T{K}_{200}^Y$ , which is an indicator of the kinetic energy transferred to occupants in a 200 ms time interval and in the lateral direction, were found to be the most appropriate metric for assessing the crash severity of side impacts with strong correlation coefficients with head injury criteria such as HIC₃₆ and HIC₁₅, resultant spinal acceleration, and moderate correlation coefficients with average rib deflection and abdominal forces. Due to the need to calculate the metric based on EDR measurements, $T{K}_{200}^Y$ was chosen as the side impact severity metric for the research program.