Italy | Local/public authority

The Department of Mechanical Engineering (DIMEC) of the Technical University of Turin promotes, co-ordinates and manages educational, research and consulting activities in the field of functional and structural planning and tests of all sorts of mechanical systems and devices.

The initiatives that the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the University of Turin commits to undertake in order to improve road safety shall involve the following:

1. Developing a model of a human head for crash testing.
   
   A model human head has been developed for crash testing that will allow the study of the mechanical behaviour of the various tissues during impact, with the aim of evaluating the probability of injury in the event of an equivalent collision occurring in real life. The aim of this project is to use the model in situations of impact, with a particular emphasis on automobile accidents.
   
   This project, already underway, shall be completed in 2007 and will be carried out in collaboration with Fiat Auto and Tesco.
   
2. Frontal Collision Model.
   
   A Multibody-FEM model has been developed to simulate and study the biomechanics of a vehicle occupant in the driver’s position involved in a frontal crash at 64 km/h against a deformable barrier.
   
   Using this model, it is possible to evaluate the influence of certain variables of the restraint system design on the biomechanical response of the occupant.
   
   The aim is to study the contribution of specific components in order to identify the most appropriate forms of intervention, which would translate into constructive specifications to be indicated to vehicle manufacturers.
   
   This project is already underway, and is being carried out in conjunction with CTO, INSIA, CRF, Tesco and Fraunhofer, and is slated to end in 2007.
   
3. Characteristics of metallic materials subject to high-velocity deformation.
   
   Metals vary their mechanical characteristics according to the rate of deformation, the so-called strain rate sensitivity.
   
   In order to ascertain the behaviour of materials used in the construction of automobiles, deformation tests at speeds of the order of 1000 1/s are required.
   
   This research is related to the development of equipment, improvement of measurement systems and extensive experimental testing in order to identify the characteristics of materials of interest for vehicle construction.
   

This project, which began in the year 2000, will be completed in 2008 and is being carried out with the collaboration of CRF and Mecalog.

In the aforementioned projects, the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the Technical University of Turin is not acting as a service provider; none of these programmes receives any funding whatsoever.