Sled test procedure tests child restraint systems
Each year around 700 children are killed on Europe's roads and a further 8,000 are injured. As the population becomes more mobile, children are increasingly transported by car making the likelihood of them being involved in an accident even greater. The CHILD project addressed this problem by developing an optimum level of protection for children in cars. This was achieved through better design, methodologies and tools that reduced the risk of injury to children. Although research had been carried out on adult occupants of cars, little was known about the effect of a frontal impact on children. The project not only proposed improved standards and testing procedures, but also new methods for virtual Child restraint system (CRS) development and testing. This was a major step towards the development and evaluation of CRSs that would offer children the best possible protection in cars. Researchers sought to achieve a better understanding of events in real car crashes and the resulting injuries experienced by child occupants. The CHILD project carried out a number of reconstructions of these crashes. The resulting data was used to calculate the child kinetics for a range of impacts for children of different ages using a variety of CRSs. Real world observations, reconstructions and computer simulations were used to evaluate the effectiveness of the CRS. One of the first goals of the CHILD project was to develop a sled test procedure that would determine the effectiveness of CRSs in frontal impacts. The work was undertaken in a way that ensured test conditions were reasonably similar to those employed by the earlier CREST project for adult occupants. The CHILD frontal test procedure was based on those used for Q-series dummies. The project recommended that the CREST frontal impact test procedure was suitable for investigating the injury criteria that were developed in another CHILD work package.
