Warrior Injury Assessment Manikin (WIAMan) Lumbar Spine Model Validation: Development, Testing, and Analysis of Physical and Computational Models of the WIAMan Lumbar Spine Materials Demonstrator

Abstract : This report describes the development, testing, and finite element model (FEM) of the Warrior Injury Assessment Manikin (WIAMan) Anthropomorphic Test Device (ATD) Lumbar Spine Materials Demonstrator. A primary objective of this work was to generate experimental data for FEM validation and to create lumbar spine demonstrators that were used to characterize candidate materials to assess the effect of material type and hardness for the lumbar spine ATD component. Several rubber chemistries and hardnesses were used for the compliant elements of the lumbar spine demonstrators. The material demonstrators were tested under dynamic loading using the Medical College of Wisconsin vertical accelerator test machine. The responses of the different lumbar spine demonstrators were compared with the biofidelic response corridors to assess the levels of biofidelity of the WIAMan ATD lumbar spine design.