Lower Extremity Injury of Vietnamese Pedestrian in Crash by a Sedan Using Numerical Simulation

Pedestrians are among the most vulnerable road users, who often suffer serious injuries in road collisions. Therefore, evaluating the injury of a pedestrian is absolutely necessary. This paper aims to evaluate the lower extremity injuries for Vietnamese people by numerical simulation using a Human Body Model (HBM) - Total Human Model for Safety (THUMS). Considering that the HBM has the anthropometrical and biomechanical properties of the North American and European bodies, it is required to scale it down to represent Vietnamese anthropometry. Furthermore, it is necessary to develop a scaling algorithm to scale the published lower extremity injury criteria to properly assess the injury risk of a Vietnamese. After a Vietnamese-sized HBM is obtained from the scaling procedure, its posture is adjusted to represent a walking pedestrian. A sedan is employed for simulating the pedestrian collision with the impact velocity ranging from 20 to 50 km/h. The car models are simplified to reduce computational time. The findings illustrate that the bending moment and resultant force of femur and tibia increase with respect to the impact velocity. The knee ligaments have been injured at high risk.