An Advanced Thorax-Shoulder Design for the THOR Dummy
Other conference contribution, 2013

Thoracic injuries are one of the main causes of fatally and severely injured casualties in car crashes. Advances in restraint system technology and airbags may be needed to address this problem; however, the crash test dummies available today for studying these injuries have limitations that prevent them from being able to demonstrate the benefits of such innovations. THORAX-FP7 was a collaborative medium scale project under the European Seventh Framework. It focused on the mitigation and prevention of thoracic injuries through an improved understanding of the thoracic injury mechanisms and the implementation of this understanding in an updated design for the thorax-shoulder complex of the THOR dummy. The updated dummy should enable the design and evaluation of advanced restraint systems for a wide variety (gender, age and size) of car occupants. The hardware development involved five steps: 1) Identification of the dominant thoracic injury types from field data, 2) Specification of biomechanical requirements, 3) Identification of injury parameters and necessary instrumentation, 4) Dummy hardware development and 5) Evaluation of the demonstrator dummy. The activities resulted in the definition of new biofidelity and instrumentation requirements for an updated thorax-shoulder complex. Prototype versions were realised and implemented in three THOR dummies for biomechanical evaluation testing. This paper documents the hardware developments and biomechanical evaluation testing carried out.

Author

Paul Lemmen

Bernard Been

David Hynd

Jolyon Carroll

Johan Davidsson

Chalmers, Applied Mechanics, Vehicle Safety

Vehicle and Traffic Safety Centre at Chalmers

Luis Martinez

Antonia García

Philippe Vezin

Andre Eggers

23rd International Technical Conference on the Enhanced Safety of Vehicles (ESV),Soul, Korea

13-0171

Subject Categories

Mechanical Engineering

Areas of Advance

Transport

More information

Created

10/8/2017