Assessment of female human body models for ballistic impact analysis with post mortem human subject (PMHS) data evaluation: A comparative study with various impact loading conditions

The present study analyses numerically the assessment capability of the female human body models GHBMC F05–P and VIVA+ F50 with regard to blunt trauma by a number of benchmark load cases. Three load cases from literature in regard to post-mortem human subject data, impact conditions by Bir et al. (2000), and three comparative impact conditions were applied. The latter, by applying impact loading with approximation of 3D surface of armour back face displacement. This load case, where no penetration occurred, contains a body armour with a hard-ballistic plate; 9 mm silicon carbide and 10 mm ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene, and a soft-ballistic component with 40–layer aramid fabric. Additionally, a load case with a non-lethal SIR 40x46 projectile impact was applied. For the evaluation of the blunt trauma, the Viscous Criterion, the Blunt Criterion and the maximum strains in the impact area were used. The evaluation was performed at two locations: mid sternum ribs levels 3-4 and rib bone cartilage junction area at level 4. In all cases, the results show the deficits of the models and that their application is also limited to analysing blunt trauma