Facilities

Center Research Facilities

    The Center for Injury Biomechanics has facilities for performing work with crash test dummies as well as human cadaver subjects. Our research is performed in two locations: the Mechanical Engineering Department at Virginia Tech and the Virginia/Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine.  The college of Veterinary Medicine serves as a resource for medical knowledge and expertise to combine with the engineering knowledge and expertise in the Mechanical Engineering Department.  The primary research facility, however, is the Center for Injury Biomechanics laboratory on the main campus of Virginia Tech.  Research thrusts at each location are detailed as follows:

Center for Injury Biomechanics:

• Dummy and cadaver experiments, as well as computational modeling
• Testing equipment, material preparation space, and specimen storage facilities
• Low rate, high rate, and small scale and large scale material testing machines
• On site machine shop and electrical shop with full time technical staff for items requiring special design or materials

College of Veterinary Medicine:

• Confidential testing space and specimen storage
• Injury evaluation for tissue damage, skin abrasions, etc.
• Full pathology department
• On site X-ray, CT, MRI, Ultrasound

Injury Diagnostic Techniques

    All injury evaluation work is performed by Board certified physicians.  In particular, X-ray and CT scans are reviewed by Board certified trauma surgeons, and pathology work is performed by Board certified pathologists. Facilities and equipment available to aid these experts in the work include the following:

• Ophthalmic ultrasound
• X-ray for pre test specimen evaluation, and post test injury evaluation
• CT for injury evaluation, and Finite Element Analysis model geometry generation
• MRI for injury evaluation, and FEM development, and for determining muscle and ligament insertion points
• Pathology and histology of sections of skin and eye can be analyzed for damage

Experimental Equipment

• High speed digital color video is used to obtain short-time (milliseconds or less) behavior of materials under impact loads not viewable using only the naked eye.  Our video system allows full color resolution of 512 by 512 pixels at 1000 frames per second, and can film at up to 30,000 frames per second at reduced resolution.  The system is digital, and not tape, and allows the added flexibility and computational simplicity of digital imaging.
• High speed digital black and white video is used to obtain similar behavior of materials when color is not necessary.  The system runs at a maximum frame rate of up to 10,000 fps, and can be used alone or in conjunction with the primary camera when imaging a test from more than one vantage point is useful
• Although the high speed digital color video system is very high resolution for its frame rate range and digital format, high speed film video is also available when higher resolution photography is desired, at rates up to 12,500 frames per second.
• A wide range of sensors are available and/or can be designed for specific research projects to work in conjunction with existing equipment.  Accelerometers, strain gages, load cells, magnetohydrodynamic angular rate sensors, shape tape for chest deformations, encoders, piezoelectric pressure sensors, and other types of sensors are available. The type of sensors used are not limited by the data acquisition system, so any sensor needed for a particular application can be used.
• A high speed data acquisition system with 64 channels, expandable to 128 channels, is simultaneously sampled at rates from 10 kHz to 20 kHz (standard), with fewer channels increasing sampling capability.
• A high speed pneumatic impactor, with velocity capability up to 90 m/s (~200 mph) will be available for high energy impacts while still maintaining controlled stroke.  This system is used to apply known loads of known durations and loading rates.  Although air bag impacts are useful, it is difficult to quantify the force at impact.  Therefore, a controllable pneumatic impactor is used to apply a similar, measurable high rate load in a controlled fashion.
• A drop tower for large scale dynamic drop testing is available, with a drop height capacity of up to 45 feet. A private indoor location for this drop tower that can be sealed for cadaver testing is also available.
• Low rate and high rate materials testing stations for both small scale and large scale tests are available.
• An on site machine shop and electrical shop with full time technical staff is available for special materials and equipment requiring special design considerations.

Computational Equipment

• The ACITC (Advanced Communications and Information Technology Center) is available, including the LASCA (Laboratory for Advanced Scientific Computing and Applications) resources:
  
       A Beowulf parallel computing cluster is currently the featured computing platform in LASCA. The cluster consists of 80 650Mhz AMD Athlon processors running LINUX, and includes a total of over 20 GB of memory and 500 GB of disk space. The nodes of the cluster are  interconnected by a 2.56 Gb/s Myrinet network.
  
       Other computing equipment available to LASCA researchers includes an SGI O200, two SGI Octanes, ten SGI O2's, and two Compaq Alpha workstations. In addition, several LASCA research projects make use of the high-performance computing resources available at DOE and NASA laboratories.

• Within the UCC (University Computing Center) and ESM and MSE departments, a large array of hardware ranging in size from PCs and workstations to large mainframes is available. Between the three resources, a multitude of computers are available with a researcher's choice of operating systems.
  
       An Intel Paragon, IBM SP2 and the SGI Power Challenge are available for large scale problems using parallel algorithms. For medium to large jobs, the Computing Center's large IBM RS/6000 servers with AIX Unix and a DEC VAX 8800 running VAX/VMS are available. An RISC 6000 workstation is available within the MSE department, in the Atomistic Simulation Laboratory.
  
       The software resources available within other departments include PATRAN, a general purpose CAE package, and ABAQUS, a finite element solver.
  
       The scientific data visualization lab has Sun Sparc, Silicon Graphics, and Digital workstations and Macintosh II-Fxs. Software in this lab includes PV-WAVE, AVS, Plot-3D, Spyglass, Polyview and Datascope.

• Computational software used within the lab includes MADYMO, PAMSAFE, Dyna3D, I-DEAS, and Ansys.  All are used for finite element analysis of high-speed events.
  

• A multitude of Unix systems are available in the MECA lab in the department of Mechanical Engineering for research use as well.

• The current in-lab computer for computational work is a dual processor 800 MHz Intel system running Windows 2000.  Other computers in the laboratory include a Linux webserver workstation running Apache (the computer you are now viewing this web page on), A 700 MHz Dell Dimension, A 300 MHz Dell Dimension, and a 133 MHz Gateway workstation. A 1 GHz Dell Dimension workstation is also set up for data acquisition only.

Virginia Tech / Wake Forest University Center for Injury Biomechanics