Citation

Ash JH, Lessley DJ, Forman JL, Zhang Q, Greg Shaw C, Crandall JR. Proc. IRCOBI 2012; 40: 142-154.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2012, International Research Council on Biomechanics of Injury)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Efforts to improve restraint design for human occupant protection require evaluations performed with anthropomorphic test devices (ATDs) and computational models to predict injury risk and rate restraint performance. As additional improvements in restraint performance are becoming increasingly difficult to achieve, increasing the precision with which we are able to predict injury is of primary importance. This requires commensurate improvement in the tools that are used to evaluate restraint performance and predict injury. The goal of the current study was to quantify the whole-body kinematic response of eight post mortem human surrogates (PMHS) tested in the same 40 km/h frontal impact condition while restrained by a threepoint belt. Kinematic data, obtained during the tests with a motion capture system, were later combined with a rigid body motion analysis that yielded three-dimensional skeletal displacements of the head, T1, T8, L2, L4, pelvis and bilateral acromia relative to the vehicle buck. These calculated data were then used to develop three-dimensional displacement corridors to quantify the whole-body kinematic response of restrained PMHS for a frontal impact conducted in a controlled laboratory environment. The provided response corridors will be immediately useful for efforts to evaluate or enhance the kinematic performance of ATDs and computational models.