A Shoulder Injury Criterion for the EuroSID-2re Applicable in a Large Loading Condition Spectrum of the Military Domain 2019-22-0006

The EuroSID-2re (ES-2re) is an Anthropometric Test Device (ATD) from the automotive domain designed for lateral impact. Since the 2000’s, it has also been used by NATO armies to assess the risk of injury to armored vehicles occupants submitted to an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) attack. The resulting loading conditions from an explosion can vary a lot in term of impact velocity and duration. They range from high velocity impacts (~28 m/s), characterized by a short duration (~10 ms) corresponding to cases where the panel deforms under an explosion, to low velocity impacts (~4 m/s), ch aracterized by a long duration (~50 ms) similar to the automotive domain. The goal of the study is to develop a shoulder injury criterion for the EuroSID-2re that is relevant over the whole loading conditions spectrum of the military domain.

For that purpose, thirty-three laboratory ES-2re tests are conducted to replicate four PMHS shoulder impactor test series from the literature. Each test series corresponds to a different loading condition in term of impact velocity and duration: [28 m/s, 3 ms], [14 m/s, 9 ms], [7 m/s, 30 ms], [4 m/s, 50 ms]. The injury result (AIS 2015 scale) of each PMHS test is paired with the shoulder sensor force response signal of the corresponding ES-2re test, resulting in a sample of 75 paired-data.

The proposed injury criterion resulting from the sample analysis is the straightened peak force Fs, which is an estimate of the peak of the external force applied to the shoulder. This criterion combines two metrics from the response signal of the shoulder force sensor Y-axis of the ES-2re ATD: the initial slope (S) and the peak (F_max). The threshold value for a given injury risk depends on the duration of the impact: it is higher for the shorter duration. Thus, a third metric should be extracted from the ES-2re shoulder load cell: the duration of the force T. The present study proposes three force-duration threshold curves Fs=f (T) for low, medium, and high risks of shoulder AI2+ injury.