Ford builds Digital Child Crash Dummy

Understandably vehicle manufacturers are putting a great deal of emphasis on the safety aspect of car design.  Consumers are increasingly looking at NCAP ratings and safety features during a new car purchase.

Ford has turned to sophisticated computer modelling to help diagnose a variety of vehicle crash situations.  In particular, Ford is continuing its work on the forces applied to the human body,  focussing on the challenges surrounding keeping the anatomy of a child safe inside a vehicle.

"We study injury trends in the field, and we know that traffic crashes are the leading cause of death for people from age 1 to 34," said Dr. Steve Rouhana, Senior Technical Leader for Safety, Ford Research and Advanced Engineering.

"We want to better understand how injuries to younger occupants may be different."

The work is the next step in Ford's decade-long research to build a sophisticated and detailed computer adult human model, with body parts and organs painstakingly replicated so scientists could better understand what happens to the adult body in a crash.

"Our restraint systems are developed to help reduce serious injuries and fatalities in the field, and they have proven to be very effective," Rouhana said.

"But crash injuries still occur. The more you know about the human body, the more we can consider how to make our restraint systems even better.

"A child's body is very different from an adult's. Building a digital human model of a child will help us design future systems that offer better protection for our young passengers."

It is a complicated task to build a digital human,  "We have to develop the geometry of the skeleton, the skin, the rib cage, the organs and then the geometry is not enough," Rouhana continues.

"You can have a beautiful model that has wonderful geometry that is useless unless we have the right material properties in there.  Each organ has different material properties, so we have to put that into the model, we have to put in the connections and the interfaces of all the different organs in the model.  We are building a human from the ground up, in a mechanical sense."
The work on Ford's adult human body model that started back in 1993 was not completed until 2004 and only then after extensive validations.

Digital models are used in research, not in vehicle development. They don't take the place of crash dummies, which measure the effect of forces on the body. Instead, they are used as a way to understand how to further improve restraint system effectiveness through better understanding of injury mechanisms.

Using medical MRI data the digital model is constructed component by component -- brain, skull, neck, ribcage, upper and lower extremities, etc. -- with extensive research included on each part.

"Building the model of a person is just like building a model of a car," said Rouhana.

"You start with your surface geometry for each component and any subcomponent it contains -- in this case the geometry of the human body and its internal organs."

Child data, however, are not as extensively available. Ford researchers, leveraging their global contacts, contracted into a one-year agreement with Tianjin University of Science and Technology, which is working with Tianjin Children's Hospital, to obtain child geometry and basic body information from sources like MRIs and CAT scans provided by volunteers.

Tianjin is one of the largest cities in China, close to the capital of Beijing. All other information for the project will be obtained from public domain literature.

"This is just the beginning," said Dr. Jesse Ruan, a researcher in biomechanics at Ford. "We're taking the first step toward building a future child digital human body model."

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