Motor vehicle crashes kill about 1.2 million people worldwide each year making it one of the most common causes of death. Side impact injuries are particularly dangerous and present different injury patterns than those seen in frontal crashes. This implies that any kind of predictive model must not only be validated in frontal impacting scenarios, but also lateral impacting scenarios. 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.

The Global Human Body Models Consortium’s (GHBMC) mid-sized male (M50) finite element model has been validated in a wide array of loading scenarios. This work will discuss a subset of that validation focusing on lateral impacts. Lateral full body sled and drop impacts will be examined first. These tests include three lateral sled tests at two different velocities into two different wall configurations and a lateral drop test from one height. Additionally, results from regional loading validation scenarios will be presented. The boundary conditions in these cases were a pelvis impact, a shoulder impact, and a thoracoabdominal impact. Finally, a sensitivity study was performed using the thoracoabdominal impact to mimic the effects of subject-to-subject variation.

These validation cases represent a small subset of the entire validation process of the GHBMC M50 model. Future work will focus on presenting other validation cases. Validation is an important milestone in the development of the M50 model and will likely continue to be improved with future model revisions. The GHBMC M50 model will be another tool available to researchers studying blunt injury and will eventually aid in improving automotive safety.