Authors: James P. Gaewsky, Derek A. Jones, Xin Ye, Bharath Koya, Kyle P. McNamara, Mona Z. Saffarzadeh, F. Scott Gayzik, Ashley A. Weaver, and Joel D. Stitzel—Virginia Tech – Wake Forest Center for Injury Biomechanics
Abstract
Injury biomechanics for the automotive environment of the future may be influenced by biomechanical analyses from other fields, including the aerospace environment. This short communication studied the influence of loading direction on the head, neck and lumbar responses of three human surrogate finite element models (Hybrid III, THOR and the simplified GHBMC 50th percentile male) subjected to low-to-moderate acceleration pulses in approximately 25+ frontal (-X), rear (+X), vertical (+Z and -Z), and lateral (+Y) pulses from a design of experiments to simulate water landings of spacecraft. Pulse magnitudes ranged from 5-25 G. BrIC, neck compression, and lumbar compression forces were cross compared between the three models for each of the five loading directions. The comparison between HIII and GHBMC lumbar forces indicated that GHBMC overestimated lumbar forces in simulations in the primarily -X loading direction compared to HIII, while in the other loading directions it typically underestimated. The results of this study help to elucidate the sensitivity and extensibility of these human surrogate finite element models across injury metrics and loading directions.
Pages: 6
Event: 62nd Stapp Car Crash Conference
Type: Short Communication