The DASS-II Data Acquisition and Storage System for the Navy Enhanced Hybrid III Type Manikin 930102

The research use of manikins for test and evaluation of escape and crashworhty seating systems, life support devices and a variety of safety equipments is well documented by the military and automotive communities. The manikin functions to load the aircraft or automotive seating system, interacting with the surrounding environment and optimally simulates human biodynamic response to the transitory acceleration of interest. Ideally, the manikin response closely approximates human reponses, enabling direct comparison and correlation to known human test data. However, manikins provide only a partial correlation to humans, having limited biofidelity and biodynamic response. The requirement to measure and quantify the 3D response of the manikin have imposed significant electronics and instrumentation requirments, further complicating the attempts to provided improved biodynamic response characteristics to the manikin. Consequently, the next generation of advanced manikins must provide the biofifelity of its human counterpart, while concurrently supporting the instrumentation and high density low cost electronics to measure and record the response dynamics.

This paper focusses and details the design and development of the next generation data acquisition and storage system (DASS-II) to be integrated into the Navy variant of the Hybrid III manikin (5th percentile female). The DASS-II structural housings are designed to maintain representative human anatomic accuracy, biodynamic response characterisitics, while incorporating the electronics necessary to measure and reconstruct the responses of interest. The system (DASS-II) incorporates a anatomically representative mechanical pelvis, housing a 96 channel analog subsystem, integrating with a chest mounted high speed processor subsystem providing real time data acquisition and data storage. The system supports a variable gain, sampling frequency (upto 8000hz.) and a tuneable anti-alaising filtering network. The system is powered via internal batteries and is compatible with current telemetry schemes. The user interfaces with the DASS-II via a dedicated IBM laptop computer to setup system function, configuration, extract data, perform calibration, and to process and review manikin response. This effort was sponsored by Mr. F.T. Thomassson, NAVAIR-531TA under P.E. 63216N.