Collegiate Times

An analysis released by AAA in April found that in 2007 alone, teenage drivers were involved in about 974,000 crashes, injuring 406,427 people and killing 2,541. Wrecks involving teenagers also cost Americans more than $34 billion annually in medical expenses, lost work, property damage loss and other related costs

To help learn more about what happens to the body during a collision, the Global Human Bodies Model Consortium is funding a $4.9 million contract with the Virginia Tech - Wake Forest University School of Biomedical Engineering and Science's Center for Injury Biomechanics.  With this money a series of finite element models that represent the human bodies during crashes are going to be developed.  These "virtual humans" will be as lifelike as possible in mechanical proportions.

Initially, there will be four models used in this project.  Of the four models, two will represent females and two will be used to represent males.  The female models will be small (the fifth percentile) and midsized (the fiftieth percentile), and the males will be midsized (the fiftieth percentile) and large (the ninety-fifth percentile).  Eventually, the consortium will expand and create other variant of models as well.  The size differences of the scalable models will be expanded to include other body shapes and sizes, as well as children and the elderly.

This project is made up of two portions, a whole body center, and a second portion where the body is split up by region.  The whole body center will be led by Joel Stitzel, the associate professor of biomedical engineering at Wake Forest, along with the Hongik University in Korea.  In the other subdivision of the project, the bodies are split up into sections such as the head, neck or thorax, with Tech in control of the abdomen.  Warren Hardy, the associate professor of mechanical engineering in Virginia Tech's College of Engineering will be heading up this portion of the model.  Hardy is joined by Phillipe Beillas from the French National Institute for Transportation and Safety Research.  Along with some of Tech's other professors, there are also quite a few grad students who will be paid to work in this specific segment of the project.

"The initial contract lasts for three and a half years, and focuses on developing four models. The entire scope of project is not known yet, it really depends on the first part.  From then on, perhaps another decade might be added on after the first few years," Hardy said with a laugh after asking how much time was going to be dedicated to this assignment.

The goal is to make the body and the collision as real as possible.   "Basically we want to try to get material properties and tolerance information," Hardy said.  The team is also planning to measure initial impact responses to make this as lifelike as they can. "Although it's never actually going to be completely human, there has been a lot of work in this area and we're trying to add new components to make it the best that it can be," Hardy said.