Measurement of Abrasion Injuries in Crash-related Environments

- A methodology to estimate abrasion injuries under loading conditions that involve sliding with friction has been proposed.
- Porcine skin specimens were abraded under a range of test loads and sliding velocities to estimate skin abrasion rate.
- The applied load was found to have more pronounced effect on the abrasion rate and hence on the possible injury severity.

Abrasions are invariably present in crash events and are partly characterized by the quantity of skin tissue removed from the superficial skin layers through friction contacts. This paper reports work towards predicting tissue loss in crash events quantitatively in order to correlate simulations with real life clinical injury. Towards this, an experimental setup that mimics the crash environment in terms of loading and motion scenarios was developed. Recording of forces at the contact zone was accomplished by a two-channel load cell in conjunction with data acquisition system. A range of normal loads, sliding velocities and surface textures were used to abrade porcine skin specimens. The severity of abrasion to the skin following each abrasive test was estimated by the amount of tissue transferred to the abrading surface by protein mass measurement.It was observed that the applied load and relative sliding speed have more pronounced effect on the abrasion rate than the dynamic coefficient of friction. The bio-tribological data obtained from the proposed friction and abrasion model can be used to correlate severity of abrasion in crash events from tribological properties such as skin abrasion rate and coefficient of friction.