Development and Validation of a Finite Element Lower Limb Model for Elderly Females

Physical surrogates and numerical models have been used to investigate the lower limb injury responses in blunt trauma related to occupant and pedestrian impacts during crash events. To date, automotive crash dummies used for studying the lower limb kinematics and injury responses in car crashes are designed to represent mid-age adults. But due to increase in fragility and frailty with age, the injury risk of the lower limb of elderly females is greater compared to younger adults. Thus, safety designs should expand for protecting elderly females in lower limb impacts. The current study focuses on developing a lower limb finite element model for elderly females with accurate anthropometry and anatomical details. The model was further validated against segmental and whole-body level experimental data of lower limb impact during pedestrian, frontal, and side impact loading. The validated model will be further integrated into the whole-body model to study injury mechanisms and safety designs for this vulnerable population of elderly females.

DEVELOPMENT OF AN ANTHROPOMORPHIC NUMERICAL SURROGATE FOR INJURY REDUCTION (ANSIR)

The current paradigm of designing a safer vehicle is to conduct biomechanical studies in order to obtain human response data for the design of more human-like anthropomorphic crash dummies. These are in turn used to develop and evaluate new concepts for vehicular safety systems. Unfortunately, significant differences exist between the dummy and the human. For instance, dummies are designed to emulate human responses in a handful of impact directions and are unable to fully simulate bony fractures. Nonetheless, dummies have become part of the governmental regulatory Proceedings, and as a result, while modern day cars are much safer than their predecessors, the fact remains that today's cars are designed to be safe for dummies. With the rapid advancement in computing technology, computer models of the human occupant have become an alternate surrogate and the purpose of this study was to establish guidelines for the development of a family of numerical surrogates to investigate human injury mechanisms and tolerance. The project is code-named ANSIR (Anthropomorphic Numerical Surrogate for Injury Reduction).