Use Inertial Sliding of Reclined Seat to Enhance Occupant Retention under Rear-End Crash

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">Autonomous vehicles may attract more passengers to recline their seat for comfort. However, under severe rear-end crashes and large reclining angle, the backward inertia could completely throw occupant out of seat. Even if the occupant body can be restrained by seatbelt, the occupant’s head could slide out of the head restraint area. Any of these situations may cause severe injuries. To address this safety concern, we developed a sliding seat system designed to enhance occupant retention. Activated by impact inertia of rear-end collision, the system allows the seat sliding backward along its track in a controlled manner, and the sliding stroke is accompanied by a restraint force and absorbs some amount of kinetic energy during the sliding. Thus, occupant retention can be enhanced, and injury risks of head and neck can be reduced.</div><div class="htmlview paragraph">To demonstrate this concept, we built a MADYMO model and conducted a parametric analysis. The model includes a 50th percentile human model, a vehicle seat, and a seat-mounted three-point seatbelt. Under 50 km/h rear-impact load, we evaluated occupant kinematics and critical injury metrics of 45^o reclined posture. The relative displacement between occupant pelvis and seatback was used to measure the distance that occupant slides backward, which is a metric for occupant retention. The results have shown that seat sliding distance is the most critical factor for occupant retention, and the longer the sliding distance, the greater the retention effect and the lower the injury risk. In a typical scenario when 200 mm of sliding distance is available for sliding, compared to traditional fixed seat (no sliding allowed), the occupant displacement is reduced by 45%, the Head Injury Criterion value is reduced by 55%, and the Neck Injury Criterion value is decreased by 66%. For vehicle seat design, using the sliding seat system may help off-load the burden of enhancing recliner stiffness, a critical component for maintaining seatback stiffness level in rear-end collisions.</div></div>