No abstract

Though energy attenuating (EA) seats for air and spacecraft applications have existed for decades, they have not yet been fully characterized for their energy attenuation capability or resulting effect on occupant protection in vertical underbody blast. EA seats utilize stroking mechanisms to absorb energy and reduce the vertical forces imparted on the occupant's pelvis and lower spine. Using dynamic rigid-body modeling, a tool to determine optimal force and deflection limits was developed to reduce pelvis and lower spine injuries in underbody blast events using a generic seat model. MAthematical DYnamic MOdels (MADYMO) and modeFRONTIER software were leveraged for this study. This optimizing tool may be shared with EA seat manufacturers and applied to military seat development efforts for EA mechanisms for a given occupant and designated blast severity. To optimally tune the EA seat response, the MADYMO Human Body Model (HBM) was first updated to improve its fidelity in kinematic response data for high rate vertical accelerative loading relative to experimental data from laboratory simulated underbody blast tests using post-mortem human surrogates (PMHS). Subsequently, using available injury criteria for underbody blast, the optimization tool demonstrated the ability to identify successful EA mechanism configurations to reduce forces and accelerations in the pelvis and lower spine HBM to presumed non-injurious levels. This tool could be tailored by varying input pulses, force and deflection limits, and occupant size to evaluate EA mechanism designs.