Safety analysis of a bicycle-mounted child seat

Cycling gains importance in urban transport. Not only in terms of environmental protection, but also in lived lifestyle. A possible way to involve children of young ages into this kind of movement is to transport them in so-called baby carriers mounted to regular bicycles. For the cyclist, the promotion of cycling as a safe and healthy form of transport is limited due to the high probability of accidents, especially in cases of impacts with motor vehicles. The safety situation of transported children is thereby poorly researched, neither in terms of kinematics nor in injury outcome. To fill this void of knowledge, the authors created a generic model of a rear-mounted bicycle baby carrier as well a sports car by 3D scanning these objects. By combining these models with adjusted MADYMO dummies and the consequently coupling of LS-DYNA with MADYMO, this paper is about to state in a first attempt the general safety situation and kinematics of a transported child on a bicycle. This includes occurring accelerations and the related injury biomechanics and criteria, as kinematics of a transported child are differing significantly from these of an adult rider.