Motor Vehicle Safety will be Enhanced By Opening of New Crash Simulator Sled By Medical College Researchers at VA
April 16 - The Medical College of Wisconsin announced today the opening of its new Neurosurgery Research Facility at the Zablocki VA Medical Center in Milwaukee to evaluate the safety of vehicle occupants under various crash modes. The $3.7 million project houses the crash simulator sled and provides room for laboratory expansion. The College’s Department of Neurosurgery invested $3 million and the remaining $700,000 was a grant from the US Department of Transportation (DOT) National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA).
The new facility will be used to conduct frontal, side- and rear-impact simulations, generating data for biofidelity evaluations of various standard and prototype dummies under various crash modes. The resulting information will be used to develop new criteria to assess the crashworthiness of vehicles and improve vehicle safety restraint systems.
The DOT requested this upgrade to the College’s existing full-scale crash laboratory to comply with the latest research agendas of both the federal government and the auto industry. This would increase research flexibility in proposing new experiments and making the data generated more applicable to modern safety systems that are being generated world wide.
“The new equipment features the flexibility of programming custom acceleration pulses (shape of acceleration waveform that the occupant experiences in a crash) rather than the generic waveform pulse shape the old facility provided,” says Frank Pintar, PhD, professor of neurosurgery and director of the neuroscience research laboratory. “This feature is critical to researching the emerging problems in vehicle crash occupant injuries including advanced restraint technology like airbags and active seat-belt restraint systems”.
The College’s biomechanics laboratory with both the full-scale crash laboratory and the new crash simulator sled laboratory is the only such facility in the world based in an academic setting. The existing full-scale crash laboratory is equipped and staffed for testing vehicles under
frontal and side-impact scenarios. It has a 471 ft. track with a 200 horse power DC motor and state-of-the-art data acquisition systems. Current projects include testing for the DOT’s NHTSA New Car Assessment Program under side impact.
Because of the biomechanics laboratory resources, Medical College biomechanics researchers have been approached by several agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), US military, and the Federal Aviation Administration, to discuss their capabilities to conduct specific impact biomechanics research.
The department of neurosurgery research program at the VA has been in place since the early 1960s and its capabilities range from analysis of microscopic injury mechanisms and treatment of brain and spinal cord injury to full-scale vehicle crashworthiness. The trauma biomechanics program was established in the early 1980’s. Its original equipment was a refurbished 1960’s bungee-cord-propelled sled installed in 1989, and has been a very important component of the considerable ($12.5 M) US-DOT-NHTSA, CDC and NIH grant funding. The program has received continuous funding from the US-DOT-NHTSA since 1987.
View crash test results for this consumer information program at http://www.safercar.gov/
View video of crash dummies at http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/real/index.html
Click on this link to see: http://www.mcw.edu/publicaffairs/video/CrashTest_April2009.htm
Crash dummy tested in the new, programmable sled crash simulator (video #2) in the Medical College of Wisconsin Biomechanics Laboratories at the Zablocki VA Medical Center in Milwaukee. It provides enhanced biofidelity information not available with the existing sled simulator, shown crashing a car in photo #1 & videos 3 & 4.
The Medical College Biomechanics Laboratories are only site in the world with both a full scale vehicle crash lab facility and sled simulator facility in an academic setting.
Fact Sheet
Medical College of Wisconsin
Neurosurgery Research Program at Zablocki VA Medical Center
Some of the major accomplishments of the research program:
• Contributed to the US Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards for neck injury in frontal impact.
• Contributed to the US Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards for protection of children from the harmful effects of airbags.
• Contributed to the US Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards for head and thorax protection of male and female occupants in near side impact collisions.
• Defined the first worldwide performance specifications for far side impact protection as a joint effort between Australia, Sweden and US resources.
• Contributed to protection of US Navy aviators through development of first computer-based assessment of potential for neck injuries.
• Developed foundational data to improve assessment of neck injury potential in side-facing seats for the US Federal Aviation Administration.