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The paper concerns the development of a new scalable virtual human body model. The model has been developed to assess safety risk during various complex crash scenarios including impacts from different directions. The novel approach described couples the basic multi-body structure with deformable segments, resulting in short calculation time. Each multi-body structure segment carries the particular surface parts that are linked to the segment with non-linear springs representing the behavior of related soft tissues. The response of particular body segments (head, thorax, pelvis, lower extremities) is validated in known impact scenarios and the response of the model is tuned to the experimental corridors obtained from literature. The tuning process involved the adjustment of both model material and numerical parameters in order to get the correct response for all the tests.

The paper contributes to the field of vehicle safety technology by the virtual approach using biomechanical virtual human body models. The goal of the paper is to exploit the previously developed scaling algorithm to create several virtual human models of a given age and body proportions and to assess the impact analysis using the sensitivity approach. Based on a validated reference model, the previously developed scaling algorithm develops virtual human body models for given height, mass, age and gender. Particular body segments are scaled based on the anthropometrical database concerning the body dimensions taking also percentiles into account. The body stiffness is driven by age dependent flexindex. Several virtual models of human bodies representing particular cadavers were generated via the automatic scaling algorithm. The frontal sled test response of three models was successfully compared to the available experimental data previously.