It’s fitting when engineer Zhenwen “Jerry” Wang begins assembling the WorldSID crash test dummy for a photo shoot and his cellphone rings.
That’s because Wang’s cellphone chimes with the “Ode to Joy” segment of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a tune long associated with “universal man” and a harbinger of goodwill.
So it is with WorldSID, among the first of a new generation of auto crash-test dummies that promise to revolutionize vehicle safety worldwide by more closely mimicking human reactions to impacts.
Studying WorldSID (World Side-Impact Dummy) as it’s being assembled at First Technology Safety Systems, it doesn’t look a lot different than the Hybrid III family of dummies that have been the safety industry’s workhorse for years. Save for a snazzy purple neoprene body suit custom-tailored for SID in London, he looks like just another manikin-like Anthropomorphic Test Device, or ATD.
But WorldSID is a seven-year (1997-2004) global auto industry initiative designed to develop an advanced technology, side-impact crash test dummy to improve assessment of injury risk to car occupants in side collisions. WorldSid will measure accelerations of the head, upper and lower spine, shoulder, chest ribs, abdominal ribs, pelvis and arms. It also will measure compression the the should and ribs as well as rotation of the head, torso, pelvis and ankles.
Two major motives drive the development of WorldSID: A better understanding of human responses in side impacts to improve occupant protection, and uniformity to eliminate the use of different dummies in different areas of the world. “We’ve recognized that there are two issues the entire world is dealing with,” said Risa Scherer, an Anthropomorphic Test Device Technical Specialist and crash safety researcher with Ford Motor Co. and WorldSID North America chairwoman. “First of all, people are basically the same worldwide, and second, the crash-test procedures are supposed to simulate identical events.”
Scherer said that WorldSID is intended to replace three dummies used around the world for side-impact tests.
The promised biofidelity (a measure of how well its behavior resembles that of a human) of this new dummy will improve on all existing dummies, she said.
“This dummy is more humanlike,” Scherer observed. “Our goal is that every component will be awarded a `good’ or `excellent’ biofidelity rating, on the scale developed by ISO [International Organization of Standards].”
Other dummies being used in today’s crash tests are “marginal” at best, according to the ISO standard.
“It offers us a world of new opportunities,” Scherer said of WorldSID. “Currently the DOT [Department of Transportation] SID has measurement capabilities in the chest, spine and pelvis–very minimal.
“WorldSID is literally filled head-to-toe with instruments. It can measure head and neck injuries, where DOT-SID could not. This is very important for full impact tests of head air bag development. So it’s going to be more humanlike, more sensitive to advancements being made in vehicles for occupant protection [such as new air-bag placement, additional padding and far side impacts where the occupant strikes the opposite side of the vehicle].
“Mainly, with WorldSID, I can now measure all of my individual rib deflections. I can measure my abdomen intrusions. There’s nothing like that in the DOT-SID by comparison.”
What’s more, the WorldSID project is developing a uniform global device rather than attempting to harmonize different test devices from the participating regions of the world.
A team of international contractors have created the prototype WorldSID dummy piece by piece. Each of the dummy’s 10 major body components were constructed separately, often on different continents.
The dummy’s head, neck and pelvis were designed and created by a consortium of European companies from the Netherlands, France and Britain. Several contractors from the U.S. designed the thorax, lumbar spine, shoulder, arms and legs and its instrumentation (such as accelerometers and load-force indicators) and dedicated data acquisition system.
European region chairman, Dominique Cesari of INRETS-France, a government-funded research lab, stressed the importance of more sophisticated side-impact crash research.
“Car safety is a key issue worldwide and side-impact accidents, even if they are less frequent than frontal ones, are more severe and providing protection is more difficult due to the limited space to control occupant motion in side impacts,” he said.
Though the “production” version of WorldSID won’t be delivered until the first quarter of 2004, the researchers like what they saw in SID’s first crash test challenge in Australia in December at the WorldSID Prototype Demonstration Workshop in Melbourne.
North America’s Scherer says WorldSID was put through its paces and passed with higher numbers than EuroSID.
“There’s still so much unknown,” Scherer said. “What we’re using right now to develop our dummies is cadaveric data [that is, testing under similar conditions to cadavers and humans]. So, there’s still a lot unknown [including information relating to the perfomance of the spine, arms and legs].”
