Carmakers team up to make dummies smarter

Monday, January 21, 2013

While it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that collaboration can speed up efforts to make vehicles safer, a dummy sure helps.

Engineers from General Motors, Ford, Chrysler and other companies have been working together for years to develop advanced crash-test dummies that can more accurately gauge vehicle safety.

Progress has been slow, but the joint effort is close to producing smarter dummies.

“We fight with our competitors fiercely in the marketplace, but when it comes to crash dummies, there’s a lot more cooperation than people realize,” said Jack Jensen, technical manager of GM’s crash-test lab.

Developing new dummies is difficult because in vehicle crash tests, they must react to horrendous impacts in the same ways the human body would.

However, test dummies must be durable enough to absorb scores or even hundreds of crashes.

Some last more than a decade - which is longer than an average NFL player’s career.

The dummies also are outfitted with digital sensors to record thousands of bits of information during every crash test, even though a typical real-world crash impact lasts only about one-seventh of a second.

Imagine wrapping your laptop in rubber casing and slamming it into a wall hundreds of times a year. That’s what it’s like for a dummy.

Crash-test dummies are extremely expensive.

GM, for example, has about 400 dummies worth about $45 million at a halfdozen crash-test safety labs throughout the world.

“The development of the dummy is a hard job,” said Jesse Buehler, principal engineer for vehicle-performance development at the Toyota Technical Center south of Ann Arbor, Mich. “It’s trying to take assemblies of steel and vinyl and mimic the response of muscle and bone.”

However, four developments in anthropomorphic test-device technology could soon lead to changes in crash-test procedures.

One, called “WorldSID,” is a side-impact dummy close to reaching the market after more than a decade of development.

It has more than 200 electronic sensors that can translate digital readings into a summary of how crashes physically affect a human - about double the number of digital readings today’s side-impact dummies can record. Automakers and governments in the U.S., Europe and Japan have contributed to WorldSID’s development. The dummy could cost much more than today’s dummies, possibly as much as $400,000 a copy, Jensen said.

Another, called THOR, is a frontal-impact dummy that was originally funded by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, being tested by several automakers.

THOR, which is an acronym for Test Device for Human Occupant Restraint, would represent significant improvements on the Hybrid III dummy, which was created in the 1970s by GMand is still widely used in test labs today.

A 2011 study by researchers from the Medical College of Milwaukee said the THOR dummy “appears to be an improvement to better assess injury potential to rear-seat occupants wherein frontal impact air bags do not exist.”

The device would particularly improve the collection of information on neck and shoulder injuries.

Chalmers University researcher Anna Carlsson in collaboration with automakers such as GM, which has developed tests to examine its effectiveness, as well as others including Volkswagen, Chrysler and Ford, has designed a rear-impact dummy called BioRID.

Carlsson said her device would improve automakers’ ability to limit neck injuries among women, who are twice as likely to sustain whiplash during a crash than men.

“To further reduce the whiplash-injury risk, it is important that future whiplash protection systems are developed and evaluated with consideration of the female properties,” the Gothenburg, Sweden, researcher said in an e-mail.

And, in the fourth area, researchers are constantly tweaking software for computerized human models to improve digital assessments of crash-test safety.

For example, Toyota scientists have developed a Total Human Model for Safety, also known as THUMS, to improve digital analysis of crash tests, and it’s already being used.

Despite new developments in crash-test dummies, obstacles remain.

Getting the required regulatory approvals to start using new dummies takes time.

“There is a long process before new technologies become implemented in regulations or used by the industry,” Carlsson said.

And the test dummies must accurately reflect the average weight of Americans, who have gotten heavier in recent decades.

Navigating the complex network of auto-safety regulations throughout the world also is a challenge.

“It’s very important that the world governments harmonize on crash-test regulations so we can run standardized tests on vehicles in multiple markets,” GM’s Jensen said.

“It allows for more efficient design of vehicles and in the long run, it allows for better design of vehicles.”

Business, Pages 12 on 01/21/2013