Yesterday, Toyota announced $50 million in new research partnerships, including several with Virginia universities. At UVA, researchers will work on optimizing Toyota’s Total Human Model for Safety (THUMS), a sensor-carrying crash test dummy that could replace what the research community calls "post-mortem human subjects"—bodies donated to science.
UVA’s Center for Applied Biomechanics has conducted personal injury studies for more than two decades. Several of those studies, from vehicular frontal impact studies to analysis of bullet, bomb and landmine injuries, utilized post-mortem subjects; this study, on head impact dynamics, compared the results culled from post-mortem subjects to those gathered from dummies.
According to Toyota’s test page, "THUMS has been thoroughly validated on a component-by-component level, but there has been limited study of THUMS at the ‘whole body’ level." The two-and-a-half-year project is outlined as follows:
"In the first year, researchers will prepare to run the simulation, develop sled models, and analyze the test data to determine response corridors. They will then add THUMS to the sled model and build virtual sensors in the THUMS model corresponding to the actual sensors used in the PMHS tests. In the final year and a half, researchers will run the simulation and comparison of THUMS to PMHS."
For more on Toyota’s study, click here.
