A Software Tool for Injury Analysis of Blast and Crash Data 2019-01-1225

In recent years the U.S. Army Tank-Automotive Research, Development, and Engineering Center (TARDEC) has been investigating the survivability and injury mechanisms of underbody blast (UBB) and crash, and their effects on personnel, with the use of Anthropomorphic Test Devices (ATD). Injury Assessment Reference Values (IARV) for crash have been researched for decades, and the US Army Research Laboratory (ARL), some years ago, also developed IARVs for UBB for the Hybrid III 50th percentile ATD. More recently, TARDEC expanded these IARVs for the 5th and 95th percentile. With the advent of TARDEC’s Occupant Protection Laboratory (OPL) large amounts of data were accumulated, which brought an interest in automating the analysis, and so a software tool was developed. The interactive in-house written software, called ICalc, allows the user to open test data files acquired from blast testing, drop tower testing, and crash testing. Data can be automatically bias corrected (zeroed), filtered, and graphed with pertinent IARV functions applied. Data from multiple files and multiple sensor channels may be graphed together for comparison and analysis. Besides being used interactively, the application can run “scripts” to graph a complete data test series automatically with the pertinent IARVs applied, along with calculated velocities and displacements for acceleration channels. A report document can be generated consisting of all accompanying graphs with an IARV summary table and bar chart showing percentage of injury for each data channel. The time to process the data and produce a report has been reduced from hours to minutes.