UG5 Non-road Safety

This User Group 5 is led by IST. Its programme aims at fostering the cooperative efforts among partners of the network and other research groups, being more focused on non-road safety. This UG5 programme has been built up in order to revert the past experience, where such collaborative efforts have been uncoordinated and focusing specific topics only. It is designed to meet the requirements and diversities of the industries, legislative bodies and research and development groups associated to different modes of transportation.

The following activities have been planned:

• To seek an early involvement of the railway organizations that deal with passive safety, such as UNIFE, UIC, CCFE, UITP or AEIF, and of the aerospace organizations. An appropriate form of kicking off such involvement would be the organization of an workshop to discuss the common topics of passive safety in the different modes of transportation.
• To have an appraisal of the risk profiles, societal impacts and methodologies in the research directed to the different modes of transportation. The identification of the appropriate IPs in the several areas of research that deal with passive safety, and within these the projects and partnerships suitable to this evaluation, is the first step towards this appraisal.
• To have an assessment of the different injury criteria and their relevance for the different modes of transportation (in conjunction with working group 1). This would include, without being limited to, the possible harmonization of such criteria from the medical and engineering standpoint, the identification of the different issues regarding injury associated to different modes of transportation and typical experimental and numerical methodologies to evaluate injury, biofidelity. For instance, due to the lack of regulations concerning injury criteria in rail vehicles, there is the tendency to use the corresponding regulations from road vehicles.
• To assess the typical design and construction of energy absorbing elements, structures and materials, including the identification of their constitutive models under dynamic loading, typically associated to each mode of transportation (in conjunction with working group 4). This appraisal will also address topics such as energy efficiency, energy versus stroke, energy versus weight or useful stroke versus total length.
• The pre-crash deployment technologies are emerging in all modes of transportation. Due to the pre-crash times, i.e., time between the moment the crash is certain and the time it actually occurs, and the vehicle lining up, the railway industry has a very high potential for an early application of such concepts. These systems, that are also being developed and applied in the road and air vehicles, share many common features and needs among all the modes of transportation. The assessment of the state-of-art and the trends for future work in the area is an activity envisaged here in order to foster collaborative efforts.
• To have an assessment of the typical testing and certification procedures used in the road, rail and aerospace industries. This is one of the areas where, due to the typical crash configuration to be very different in nature, there are very few synergies between the research teams associated to each mode of transportation. Also in here the transference of technologies between different modes required adaptations, very often done in empirical manner.
• To have an assessment of the typical virtual testing methodologies used in the design of different modes of transportation (in conjunction with working group 3). Due to the large differences in the geometries of the vehicles, crash scenarios, duration of the crash events or severity of the crash the numerical procedures used in different phases of the design and analysis is quite varied. The potential for synergetic efforts between the players in the different areas of research in passive safety is quite high, and therefore, needs to be identified.