A Computational Model of the Human Head and Neck for Frontal and Lateral Impacts

This paper presents the development and validation of a three-dimensional computational model of the human head and neck. The model has been produced to study the mechanics of the human cervical spine in response to automobile impacts. The complete head-neck model has been used to simulate 15g frontal and 7g lateral impacts with the resulting motion compared against response corridors derived from sled acceleration tests using human volunteers. The effect of passive and fully active muscle behaviour has been investigated and it is shown that for both impact directions the inclusion of active muscle tensioning results in closest agreement with the experimental data. Good agreement is seen for both impact directions. An analysis of the local loads in the soft-tissue components is also presented for the 15g frontal impact case.