Abstract
The most frequent causes of blunt abdominal injury are the steering wheel and the lap belt. The organs most often injured are the liver, pancreas, spleen and intestines. Based on this information, a series of animal abdominal impacts were designed to study the relationship between shape and type of impactor, velocity and direction of impact, body region impacted and injury level. The results of this study are given in the form of an experimental scaling factor which relates the sensitivity to impacts of the various body regions. This scaling factor was found to be dependent of body weight, making it applicable for evaluating human tolerances to abdominal impacts.
A cadaver program was initiated as part of the human response to impact study. Cadavers were received approximately one to three days after death, and were unembalmed. These cadavers were impacted on the front of the chest over the fourth rib. The velocity of the impact and the mass of the impactor were held constant. Static compression tests were also conducted on the chest in the anterior-posterior direction using both cadavers and human volunteers. The results are given as load-deflection curves with comparison to previous published data.
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Stalnaker, R.L., McElhaney, J.H., Roberts, V.L., Trollope, M.L. (1973). Human Torso Response to Blunt Trauma. In: King, W.F., Mertz, H.J. (eds) Human Impact Response. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-1502-6_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-1502-6_10
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