scope:

The scope of the document presented here is to define an injury risk assessment method, in line with the current state of science, to quantify the thorax injury risk of non-lethal non-penetrative projectiles (AEP 94 [1] assesses the penetrative impact). The assessment method is at this stage limited to the current knowledge, meaning that the investigated injuries are currently limited to rib and sternum fracture due to a sternal impact for Post Mortem Human Subjects (PMHS). Indeed, studies about other relevant injuries are not available at this time.

The assessment process consists of experimental or numerical evaluations. Both approaches are based on results produced by Wayne State University (WSU) [2].

The objective is to determine the (VC)_max injury criterion (see section 1.3) obtained by shooting the projectile against a physical surrogate, or to numerically compute it by simulating the impact of a numerical projectile on a numerical thorax model (numerical surrogate). The lower the (VC)_max value, the lower the probability to observe the mentioned injuries.