ISO Offers Standards on 'Intelligent' Crash Test Dummy for Side Impact Testing

December 19, 2005

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) released a new suite of standards to provide the automotive industry with an advanced human crash test dummy for improving vehicle design and increasing passenger safety.

The new crash test dummy, known as World Side Impact Dummy (WorldSID), was developed to allow a single, universally-accepted test device to be used for side impact testing in any regulation around the world.

The design details have been documented in ISO 15830:2005 – Road vehicles – Design and performance specifications for the WorldSID 50th percentile male side-impact dummy. It consists of four parts.

The documentation, which comprises nearly 500 pages plus 400 fabrication drawings and CAD files, includes all of the design details, material specifications and performance standards required for fabrication of the WorldSID.

“WorldSID heralds a significant improvement in the ability of crash dummies to duplicate human motions and responses in side impact tests – known as the dummy's biofidelity,” said Edmund Hautmann, chair of the ISO WorldSID task group.

Developed by ISO technical committee ISO/TC 22, road vehicles; subcommittee SC 12, passive safety crash protection systems; and working group WG 5, anthropomorphic test devices; the suite of standards results from recent advances in electronic miniaturization and micro circuitry that provide the test engineer with a wide range of sensors and date recording instrumentation.

WorldSID's 224 sensors capture data more than 10,000 times per second and store the information in special memory boards inside the dummy, making it one of the most advanced (and probably the smartest) crash test dummy in the world.

Source: The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and The American National Standards Institute (ANSI).