A numerical model for blast injury of human thorax based on digitized visible human.

Knowledge of the pressure distribution around human thorax in blast help to understand the injury mechanisms and their assessment. To investigate the transmission mechanism of the pressure on human thorax in blast, a three dimension surface model of human thorax was constructed in this work. To increase the precious of this model, tetrahedron element division method was applied to transfer the rough 3D surface model to hexahedral elements model. Using this model, the high pressure duration was computationally solved using numerical simulation of the hexahedral elements. Simulation results showed that the apex of lungs was subjected to the largest stress in a blast. In order to verify this result, an animal experiment was performed on a dog. The animal experimental results was shown to have a same variation tendency with the calculation results based on our numerical model of human thorax, which made this model reliable for the blast injury research.