Software to Calculate Occupant Forces in Real-World Crashes

A need exists for economical, high capacity software to aid medical and engineering researchers to more easily and consistently calculate forces acting on vehicle occupants during real-world crashes. One example of such research is NHTSA¿s Crash Injury Research and Engineering Network (CIREN), which in addition to collecting injury and vehicle information, has increasing access to data from Event Data Recorders (EDRs) present in production vehicles. The objectives of this R&D effort would be to develop and demonstrate an easy-to-use software tool that would be able to access all the available crash information, and automatically set-up and run computer simulations. These would use the recorded or estimated vehicle kinematics, and would calculate the three dimensional occupant contacts, forces, and motions, enabling the user to associate these with the observed contacts and injuries. The proposed effort involves integrating existing public domain software, data, and methods the DRI has used and is intimately familiar with (e.g., ATB, GEBOD, NHANES, NASS-CDS data forms, linked vehicle parameter databases, DRI VISIONFORM, graphical user interfaces, etc.), without incorporating costly third party software. The proposal also addresses uncertain data and parameter values, and provides Phase I initial and final user workshops and feasibility demonstration.