Developing rib bone surrogates for high dynamic impact assessment with additive manufacturing and post-mortem human subjects (PMHS)-based evaluation

The conception of ballistic personal protective equipment requires a comprehensive understanding of the human body’s response to dynamic loads. The objective of this study is to develop rib bone surrogates enhancing new anthropomorphic test devices for personal protective equipment evaluation at high dynamic impacts. These are fabricated with additive manufacturing and compared to post-mortem human subjects (PMHS) data from literature. The 5th rib of the finite element Global Human Body Model Consortium (GHBMC) male 50th percentile (M50) model was extracted and transferred to a CAD model. This CAD model was divided into 30 sections with specific cortical bone thicknesses in all directions (caudal, cranial, cutaneous and pleural) from an equivalent rib of an M50 PMHS. Three different additive manufacturing technologies (direct metal laser melting, fused filament fabrication and multi jet modeling) were used to reproduce the M50 PMHS 5th rib surrogate. A total of 57 specimens were dynamically (500 mm/s) loaded to failure in a bending scenario imitating a frontal thoracic impact. Force, displacement, stiffness, and energy at failure were determined. Also, the strain distribution using 3D digital image correlation was recorded and compared to PMHS data from literature. The rib surrogates show deviations from the PMHS characteristic values. Nevertheless, there are also common characteristics in key variables to certain age groups of the PMHS data, which will facilitate the further development and improvement of adequate surrogates for a more realistic representation of the human body’s response to high dynamic loads.