Acceleration corridors of small female post-mortem human subjects in near-side and far-side frontal oblique impacts.

Abstract

The objective of the study wasto develop acceleration-timeresponsecorridors of small female post-mortem human subjects (PMHS) in frontal near-side and far-side oblique impacts. The restrained specimens were seated on a sled and tested at a velocity of 8.40 ± 0.05 m/s. Accelerometers were attached tothehead, upperthoracic spine, lower thoracic spine, lumbar spine,and sacrum. Using the equal-stress equal-velocity approach, data were normalized to5th-percentilefemale total body mass of 50 kg. Acceleration-time response corridors were obtained using normalized data from each specimen. Ten specimens were tested with a sample size of five each in the near-side and far-side conditions. The mean age, stature, total body mass, sitting height, and bone mineral density (BMD) of the combined dataset of specimens were 72 years, 1.58 m, 47.4 kg, 0.88 m, and 121 kg/m³, respectively. Acceleration magnitudes of the upper thoracic spine and head were significantly greater (p < 0.05) in the near-side than in the far-side condition. The following are given the body paper and/or supplementary materials: demographics and BMD data for each condition, acceleration time histories and their maximum magnitudes, and the set of 40 corridors (3 components, 1 resultant acceleration, 2 conditions, 5 regions) with peaks and times of occurrences for both conditions. Because biomechanical response corridors were developed using only small females, they can be used to validate human body models and evaluate the biofidelity of small female anthropomorphic test devices for crashworthiness studies.