Modelling of Whiplash Trauma Parametric study of rear-end impacts using FEM and CFD

Abstract: This work is a combination of Finite Element (FE) modelling and ComputationalFluid Dynamics (CFD) to investigate the effect of acceleration pulses, head restraintand seating posture on facet joint loads and pressure transient magnitudes on the neckinjury outcome during whiplash motion.A parametric study is carried out with the FE human body model THUMS (TotalHUman Model for Safety) for a variety of crash pulses and crash conditions that havea known relative risk of long term neck injuries in rear-end impacts. The injurycriterion NIC (Neck Injury Criteria) is addressed for the studies made.The THUMS model is used to generate the motion data of the spinal canal, which isused as an input to simulate the behaviour of the spinal canal to analyse the pressuretransients in the network of blood vessels during the whiplash motion performingCFD simulations using the OpenFOAM CFD toolbox. Using the output of FEsimulations, a moving mesh technique is used to achieve the motion of the meshpoints in the CFD simulations.The results give an insight into proposed injury mechanisms and injury riskassessment criteria concerning long term neck injuries. The effect of head restraintand its position with respect to the driver’s head in mitigating the above injuries isdiscussed for different crash scenarios.