Car manufacturers across the globe understand the need to make safer cars and hence test their cars with utmost care. One of the formidable part of crash testing any car is the crash test dummies, that represent humans and reveal all sorts of forces and impacts that could prove during an accident. To that extent, crash test dummies help a great deed.
The traditional crash test dummy, which has served the crash test industry for over 50 years now had a military physique, representing average human body a couple of decades ago. But the times have changed a lot and with changing lifestyles, the average human body has also changed and they are no more as military as they used to be.
In comes a U.S based crash test dummy manufacturer and developer called Humanetics who have come up with a brilliant solution to include more human elements to the crash testing. Humanetics has proposed to add a new generation of dummies to reflect the rise in the numbers of elderly and obese drivers, along with ‘organs’ that behave like real ones.
Created with the help of Prof. Stewart Wang, a trauma surgeon and director of the International Center for Automotive Medicine at the University of Michigan, the two models revealed are that of a borderline-obese 70-year-old female with a BMI of 29 and an obese 6ft 2in middle-aged male adult with a BMI of 35. According to Wang these two are the fast growing groups of drivers and are not served by existing crash test dummies.
“Today’s dummies represent the average but car makers have been using them for 50 years,” Wang said. “Give engineers that long to pass a test and they get better at protecting that fit physique. However, they’re ignoring a very significant and more normal part of the population.” “The obese suffer more lower extremity injuries than average drivers but fewer abdominal. With the elderly, the area of concern is not the lower extremities but the chest”, Wang added.
A research carried out by the University of California in 2013 found that obese drivers are up to 78 percent more likely to die in a car crash than drivers of average weight. The design of the standard crash test dummy had the lap belt tie across an occupant’s bony hips, while the diagonal belt applies force to the chest.
In the obese people, the lap belt sits above the abdomen, and with elderly people, the pressure exerted by the diagonal belt can cause serious chest injuries. The new crash test dummies are a result of thousands of CT scans and the resulting 3D images were measured in a process called analytic morphomics, a method for expressing different physiological states in numbers and measurements. The data will further be used to install artificial organs that will behave like real ones in a crash.
The 3D printing process is used to produce body parts and vital organs that will behave like the real things in a car crash. “We use 3D printing to create body parts such as a rib,” said Jim Davis of Humanetics. “Previously, we had to design something that would deflect and move like a rib but not break like one. With 3D printing and new materials, we can tune a rib to the precise performance we want.”
Both the dummies are still in the prototype stage, but Jim Davis, VP of engineering at Humanetics, is keen to make them a reality. “It takes a village to raise a dummy, so we’re working not only with ICAM but with major OEMs on their development,” he said.
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