Motor vehicle crashes kill over 1 million people worldwide each year making them one of the most common causes of death. With finite element models being used as tools to study blunt injuries, it is critical to validate them in a range of loading scenarios to ensure accurate model outputs. While human body models have typically been validated qualitatively, quantitative methods available to researchers can provide objective comparisons to the experimental data or between models. Validated human body models can help reveal the role that body habitus plays in injury outcomes for motor vehicle occupants. The objective of this dissertation was to validate a mid-sized male full human body finite element model and use that model as a basis for the development of a large male model.

The Global Human Body Models Consortium’s (GHBMC) mid-sized male (M50) finite element model has been validated in various levels. This work presents part of that validation. First, the mass distribution of the model is compared to literature values for a mid-sized male population. Then, several objective comparison methods are evaluated and a favored approach is chosen. An update to this approach is used to validate the GHBMC M50 in rigid body impacts spanning from the shoulder through the pelvis. The validated GHBMC M50 model is used as the basis to create the GHBMC 95th percentile male (M95) model through a radial basis function interpolation with a thin-plate spline basis function. Qualitative and quantitative methods are used to validate the GHBMC M95 model both anatomically and in simulations. Finally, a quantitative comparison between the two models was made evaluating injury risk and the efficacy of a curve scaling technique widely used in injury biomechanics. Since the M95 model was morphed directly from M50 and they share all of the same modeling techniques, direct comparisons can be made between the models when run in the same simulation.

The GHBMC models presented in this work have become valuable tools for researchers to use in studying injury biomechanics. The culmination of the current work found that injury risk differences exist between the average male and large male models in a frontal crash test. Future work could provide further comparison between the M50 and M95 models to determine the effects that morphometric changes have on injury metrics in other crash modes and impact types. This will provide valuable information when trying to protect occupants of all sizes.