Nearly 100 DTS employees and several key US Army personnel have celebrated the opening of the new WIAMan ATD lab inside the DTS headquarters in Seal Beach, California, USA. It will be used exclusively to support the design, development and testing of the first blast test dummy, the Warrior Injury Assessment Manikin (WIAMan).
The new 3,000ft2 lab is furnished with state-of-the-art test equipment including an 11ft drop tower used to simulate the vertical impact experienced by an occupant in a vehicle blast. A five-point harness secures WIAMan in the drop tower seat while a 200g pulse simulates blast forces. Load cells in the seat measure five different load paths through the pelvis and femur to quantify potential spine and lower extremity injuries. A linear impactor performs iterative testing on lower leg and pelvis components, accelerating a 20kg impact mass to a velocity of 20m/s. Analyzing gross motor movement in slow motion helps engineers better understand the forces that soldiers experience in the field, so multiple high-speed cameras capture the action at over 100,000fps.
To measure potential skeletal injuries, WIAMan currently uses 146 channels of embedded data acquisition and sensors, but is designed to support up to 180 channels. The self-contained miniature data acquisition systems are distributed throughout the test manikin and include internal power and a variety of sensors. The data collected includes 6DOF of forces, moments, accelerations and angular velocities from sensors located along the pelvis, spine, tibia and foot/heal.
March 15, 2017
