An Advanced Thorax-Shoulder Design for the THOR Dummy

• Thoracic injuries are one of the main causes of fatallyand severely injured casualties in car crashes.Advances in restraint system technology and airbagsmay be needed to address this problem; however, thecrash test dummies available today for studying theseinjuries have limitations that prevent them frombeing able to demonstrate the benefits of suchinnovations. THORAX-FP7 was a collaborativemedium scale project under the European SeventhFramework. It focused on the mitigation andprevention of thoracic injuries through an improvedunderstanding of the thoracic injury mechanisms andthe implementation of this understanding in anupdated design for the thorax-shoulder complex ofthe THOR dummy. The updated dummy shouldenable the design and evaluation of advancedrestraint systems for a wide variety (gender, age andsize) of car occupants.The hardware development involved five steps:1) Identification of the dominant thoracic injury typesfrom field data, 2) Specification of biomechanicalrequirements, 3) Identification of injury parametersand necessary instrumentation, 4) Dummy hardwaredevelopment and 5) Evaluation of the demonstratordummy.The activities resulted in the definition of newbiofidelity and instrumentation requirements for anupdated thorax-shoulder complex. Prototype versionswere realised and implemented in three THORdummies for biomechanical evaluation testing. Thispaper documents the hardware developments andbiomechanical evaluation testing carried out.

Subject headings

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Maskinteknik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Mechanical Engineering (hsv//eng)

Publication and Content Type

kon (subject category)

vet (subject category)