A Proposal of Dummy Neck Certification Test 2016-01-0405

Crash Test Dummies are the very important tools to evaluate the vehicle safety performance. In order to ensure the dummy performance during the crash tests, the dummy components need to be certificated. In the neck certification procedure, the head angle is the most important parameter, which is the head rotation respect to the neck base. To get the head angle, couples of rotary potentiometers should be mounted either on the calibration fixture or on the dummy head. The rotation is then calculated from those potentiometer readings. There are two potentiometers mounted in the Hybrid III family dummies, while three potentiometers mounted in ES2, ES-2re, SID-IIs, and WorldSid 50^th dummies. In the certification, maximum head angle and time occurred should be within certain ranges in the Hybrid III family dummies while for the ES2 and WorldSid 50^th dummies, not only the maximum head angle, but also the other angles and their timings should meet the requirements. It is very difficult to get all of them in the test corridors, sometimes needs couple of testing days. In many cases the maximum head angle is in the corridor while the others are not. The purpose of mounting rotary potentiometers is to obtain the head angle and it is not necessary to bring all the angles into the specifications. In this paper the dummy neck certification procedures and head angle calculation are discussed. A proposal is made for the ES2 and WorldSid 50^th dummies to remove the individual maximum angles and remain the head angle in the specification.