The foot and ankle is among the most frequently injured body regions in motor vehicle collisions (MVCs), particularly within the small female population. The study aims to enhance the GHBMC-owned 5th percentile female (F05) detailed occupant finite element (FE) model using comprehensive validation data generated for small females. The anatomical representation and injury characterisation of F05 ankle model was updated from the previously released model. A methodology for shoe fitting was developed and simulations were performed under load cases representing shod foot and ankle impacts potentially experienced by MVC occupants. The simulations achieved CORelation and Analysis (CORA) score ranging from 0.692 to 0.989 over the suite of validation cases, with the force or moment response curves generally lying within the test corridors. To predict the failure in the ankle simulations, failure threshold of the leg bones was defined using scaled male dataset. The ankle simulations performed show that although the model response lie within bounds of the test dataset, some differences in the failure patterns were observed, which may be a result of difference in material properties between the sexes. Future work will focus on improving tissue level injury predictions using simulations and experiment data for small females.
Keywords:
5th percentile female; biofidelity; finite element; lower extremity; shoes