Development and validation of THUMS version 5 with 1D muscle models for active and passive automotive safety research.

Abstract

Accurately predicting the occupant kinematics is critical to better understand the injury mechanisms during an automotive crash event. The objectives of this study were to develop and validate a finite element (FE) model of the human body integrated with an active muscle model called Total HUman Model for Safety (THUMS) version 5, which has the body size of the 50th percentile American adult male (AM50). This model is characterized by being able to generate a force owing to muscle tone and to predict the occupant response during an automotive crash event. Deformable materials were assigned to all body parts of THUMS model in order to evaluate the injury probabilities. Each muscle was modeled as a Hill-type muscle model with 800 muscle-tendon compartments of 1D truss and seatbelt elements covering whole joints in the neck, thorax, lumbar region, and upper and lower extremities. THUMS was validated against 36 series of post-mortem human surrogate (PMHS) and volunteer tests on frontal, lateral, and rear impacts. The muscle architectural and kinetic properties for the hip, knee, shoulder, and elbow joints were validated in terms of the moment arms and maximum isometric joint torques over a wide range of joint angles. The muscular moment arms and maximum joint torques estimated from THUMS occupant model with 1D muscles agreed with the experimental data for a wide range of joint angles. Therefore, this model has the potential to predict the occupant kinematics and injury outcomes considering appropriate human body motions associated with various human body postures, such as sitting or standing.