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Concept
Crashworthiness
Summary
Crashworthiness is the ability of a structure to protect its occupants during an impact. This is commonly tested when investigating the safety of aircraft and vehicles. Different criteria are used to figure out how safe a structure is in a crash, depending on the type of impact and the vehicle involved. Crashworthiness may be assessed either prospectively, using computer models (e.g., RADIOSS, LS-DYNA, PAM-CRASH, MSC Dytran, MADYMO) or experiments, or retrospectively, by analyzing crash outcomes. Several criteria are used to assess crashworthiness prospectively, including the deformation patterns of the vehicle structure, the acceleration experienced by the vehicle during an impact, and the probability of injury predicted by human body models. Injury probability is defined using criteria, which are mechanical parameters (e.g., force, acceleration, or deformation) that correlate with injury risk. A common injury criterion is the head impact criterion (HIC). Crashworthiness is measured after the fact by looking at injury risk in real-world crashes. Often, regression or other statistical methods are used to account for the many other factors that can affect the outcome of a crash.
The history of human tolerance to deceleration can likely be traced to the studies by John Stapp to investigate the limits of human tolerance in the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Pakistan Army began serious accident analysis into crashworthiness as a result of fixed-wing and rotary-wing accidents. As the US Army's doctrine changed, helicopters became the primary mode of transportation in Vietnam. Due to fires and the forces of deceleration on the spine, pilots were getting spinal injuries in crashes that they would have survived otherwise. Work began to develop energy-absorbing seats to reduce the chance of spinal injuries during training and combat in Vietnam. A lot of research was done to find out what people could handle, how to reduce energy, and how to build structures that would keep people safe in military helicopters.
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