Abstract
Neck injuries resulting from low speed car accidents are common and have a high associated societal cost. Crash test dummies are commonly used in simulations of these type of collisions and test results can be used to enhance vehicle safety through improved design. To overcome some of the limitations of the existing dummies for these types of impacts a new neck has been developed at the University of Sydney for low speed omnidirectional impacts. The new neck is designed to have a high level of overall biofidelity in terms of head and neck responses. Additionally, being anatomically based, the neck is designed to exhibit greater biofidelity at the local level in terms of relative vertebral motions.
The new neck consists of seven aluminium cervical vertebra and six rubber intervertebral discs and is designed to fit the Hybrid III head and torso. Sled tests with the new neck were carried out at low speed in frontal, rear and lateral directions. Good correlation was achieved between the test results and published volunteer response data.