The Finite Element Modeling And Application Of The95^thPercentile Chinese Human Head

As the automotive industry grows rapidly, more and more people have paid extra attention to the concerns of vehicle safety. Head injuries, often resulted from traffic accidents, have caused a great deal of social-economic loss and family tragedy due to the high mortalities and disabilities of these injuries. Therefore, research of head injury biomechanics has been in the upfront of vehicle safety and is more urgent nowadays. With the development of computer technology, computational head injury biomechanics has found a driving force:more finite element models of the human head have been developed one after another. However, most of the available models are50th percentile based,95th percentile models are rarer and if there is one, it is based on the scaling law from the50th percentile model. A practical,95th percentile based head model is needed in order to deepen and extend the research in the field of injury biomechanics of the human head.In this research, we constructed a geometric solid head model based on95th percentile Chinese head from CT scan images. Techniques such as anatomical feature recognition, graphic data processing,3-D reconstruction, and finite element meshing were used. The model includes the scalp, skull, brain, cerebellum, brainstem, cerebral falx, tentorium of cerebellum, ventricles, and cerebrospinal fluid. A commercial available analysis software PAM-CRASH is used to simulate the process of frontal crash. Impact responses such as brain stresses and strains, relative displacements between the skull and brain, intracranial pressures, and so on, were obtained from the analysis. Through the output data, one can reasonably predict the trends of injuries for a95th percentile head during impact.This model can be used in the vehicle safety development in the vehicle design process and therefore can provide a useful scientific reference for further safety improvement. Also, the data provided in this research can help to develop future regulations for head injury protection during transportation accidents.