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Posterior cruciate ligament (PCL) injuries, although rarely life threatening, affect the quality of life of the person who sustains the injury. The PCL is the primary restraint to posterior tibial translation and can be injured when the tibia moves posteriorly relative to the femur. This type of injury is common in frontal crashes where the tibia may impact the dashboard or steering column. To quantify what happens during dynamic loading of the tibial plateau, isolated cadaveric lower limbs (n = 14) were impacted at dynamic rates with a linear pneumatic ram. During the testing, a static load was applied to the quadriceps tendon to simulate active musculature. Forces as well as the stretch of the PCL were measured. The most common injuries were tibia fractures and PCL tears. The stiffness for the tests at impact velocities of 1.4 and 2.9 m/s were on average 120 N/mm and 141N/mm, respectively. A trend towards increasing femur force with increasing velocity was found.

The goal of this study is to evaluate both the internal and external biofidelity of existing rear impact anthropomorphic test devices (BioRID II, RID3D, Hybrid III 50th) in two moderate-speed rear impact sled test conditions (8.5g, 17 km/h; 10.5g, 24 km/h) by quantitatively comparing the ATD responses to biomechanical response targets developed from PMHS testing in a corresponding study. The ATDs and PMHS were tested in an experimental seat system that is capable of simulating the dynamic seat back rotation response of production seats. The experimental seat contains a total of fourteen load cells installed such that external loads from the ATDs and PMHS can be measured to evaluate external biofidelity. The PMHS were instrumented to correspond to the instrumentation contained in the ATDs so that direct comparison between ATDs and PMHS could be made to evaluate internal biofidelity.