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In the last decade, extensive efforts have been made to understand the physics of submarining and its consequences in terms of abdominal injuries. For that purpose, 27 Post Mortem Human Subject (PMHS) tests were performed in well controlled conditions on a sled and response corridors were provided to assess the biofidelity of dummies or human body models. All these efforts were based on the 50th percentile male. In parallel, efforts were initiated to transfer the understanding of submarining and the prediction criteria to the THOR dummies. Both the biofidelity targets and the criteria were scaled down from the 50th percentile male to the 5th percentile THOR female. The objective of this project was to run a set of reference PMHS tests in order to check the biofidelity of the THOR F05 in terms of submarining. Three series of tests were performed on nine PMHS, the first one was designed to avoid submarining, the second and third ones were designed to result in submarining.

Seven Post Mortem Human Subjects were submitted to three low velocity impacts (v=1.5 m/s) to the right shoulder at three different angles in the horizontal plane (−15°, 0°, +15°). Then, the left shoulder was submitted to a purely lateral high velocity impact (v=3, 4, 6 m/s). The load was delivered by a 23.4 kg impactor fitted with a rigid rectangular impacting plate. Shoulder and thoracic bone structures were equipped with tri-axial accelerometers and photographic markers, whose trajectories were tracked in 3D by seven high-speed cameras. The results were scaled in order to account for the differences between the subjects’ anthropometry and to define response corridors for the evaluation of the dummies’ shoulders. Impact forces as well as several shoulder deflections were analyzed with respect to each subject’s injury survey in order to find the most relevant parameters for the prediction of injuries.