LAUSR

A validation comparing five Human Body Model (HBM) lumbar spines is carried out across two load cases, with the objective to use and apply HBMs in high strain rate applications such as car occupant simulation. The first load case consists of an individual intervertebral disk (IVD) loaded in compression at a strain rate of 1/s by a material testing machine. The second load case is a lumbar functional spine unit (FSU) loaded in compression using a drop tower setup, producing an strain rates of up to 48/s. The IVD simulations were found to have a better agreement with the experiments than the FSU simulations, and the ranking of which HBMs matched best to the experiment differed by load case. These observations suggest the need for more hierarchical validations of the lumbar spine for increasing the utility of HBMs in high strain rate loading scenarios.