ANALYSIS OF LIVER IMPACT RESPONSES THROUGH A CHINESE HUMAN BODY FINITE ELEMENT MODEL

Human liver biomechanical responses associated with frontal impacts, lateral impacts were studied using a simplified Chinese human body Finite Element Model (FEM) with more geometrical-accurate liver model for an average Chinese adult male from high resolution CT data. The developed model in this paper was composed by geometrically detailed liver model, simplified models of thoracic-abdominal organs, and the human skeleton model. Then, the whole model was validated at various velocities by comparing simulation outcomes with Post Mortem Human Subjects (PMHS) experimental results in frontal and lateral pendulum impacts. The force–deflection and force–time characteristics were in good agreement with the test results. The validated model was then applied for studying liver dynamic responses and injuries in simulations. Pressure, tensile stress and peak strain that may induce hepatic injuries was computed from model simulations and were analyzed about the correlation with the global parameters, like thoracic deflection, viscous criterion value, contact force. This study demonstrated that the method of developing a simplified finite element thorax-abdomen model with detailed liver model could be effective of hepatic injury assessment in various impacts reported in literature.