Introduction: The availability of highly automated driving functions will vastly change the seating configuration in future vehicles. A reclined and rearward-facing seating position could become one of the popular seating positions. The occupant safety needs to be addressed in these novel seating configurations, as novel occupant loading conditions occur and the current standards as well as regulations are not fully applicable. Method: Twelve finite element simulations using a series production seat model and a state of the art 50th percentile male human body model were conducted to investigate the influences of various parameters on the occupant kinematics and injury risk. The varied parameters included the seatback angle, impact speed, and seatback rotational stiffness. Results: The seat model shows a large seatback rotation angle during the frontal crash scenario with high impact speed. A reclining of the seatback angle leads to no significant increase of the injury risk for the assessed injury values. However, the reclining does affect the interaction among the occupant, seatbelt, and seatback. An increase of the seatback rotational stiffness helps reduce brain and chest injury metrics, while neck injury values are higher for the stiffer seatback.

简介：高度自动驾驶功能的可用性将极大地改变未来车辆的座椅配置。倾斜和向后的座椅位置可能成为流行的座椅位置之一。在这些新颖的座椅配置中需要解决乘员安全问题，因为会出现新的乘员负载条件，并且当前的标准和法规并不完全适用。方法：使用系列生产座椅模型和最先进的第 50 个百分位数进行十二次有限元模拟进行了男性人体模型，以研究各种参数对乘员运动学和伤害风险的影响。不同的参数包括座椅靠背角度、冲击速度和座椅靠背旋转刚度。结果：座椅模型在高冲击速度的正面碰撞场景中显示出较大的座椅靠背旋转角度。对于评估的伤害值，座椅靠背角度的倾斜不会导致伤害风险的显着增加。然而，倾斜确实会影响乘员、安全带和座椅靠背之间的相互作用。座椅靠背旋转刚度的增加有助于减少大脑和胸部损伤指标，而较硬的座椅靠背的颈部损伤值更高。