Human injury prediction and research
Human safety is often the primary issue in the analysis, design, and testing Protection Engineering Consultants performs. As Americans become increasingly risk-averse, emphasis on minimizing casualties also increases. While this has always been true for VIPs, it is also important for the general public as well as warfighters and non-combatants.
One of the main motivations for developing test and analysis protocols for armored passenger vehicles was the need to predict occupant injury. Protection Engineering Consultants has performed numerous tests with anthropomorphic test devices (ATDs) and used test results to develop improved armor designs that reduce the probabilities of injury.
Engineers at Protection Engineering Consultants were the first to use instrumented cadavers and ATDs to evaluate the potential for human injury in a terrorist bombing and determine safe explosive standoff distances and to quantify risk of injury. Data from these tests were used to correlate the injuries observed with the cadavers to the injuries predicted by the ATDs, which were not designed for such an environment. These comparisons highlighted the issues and shortcomings of using conventional ATDs for such tests.
Protection Engineering Consultants personnel have developed the BICADS computer program for the U.S. government. The first step in this development was collecting a large database of injury information for building occupants near terrorist and accidental explosions. This data and engineering models were used to develop correlations between blast loads, building damage, and occupant injuries from explosions for a variety of typical building construction types. Based on these correlations and blast load and building component damage calculations, BICADS predicts injures to occupants of a wide range of conventional building types from exterior explosions. This approach is shown below.
Protection Engineering Consultants engineers have also overseen blast testing of windows to determine the properties of glass fragments created by window failure from blast and used the data to develop a methodology for determining the fragment characteristics. These fragment characteristics are used in a detailed engineering model to predict injuries in several U.S. government computer programs.