Three Milwaukee institutions — Marquette University, the Medical College of Wisconsin, and the VA Medical Center — are continuing their work on a “blast-test” dummy. The dummy could help reduce harm to U.S. armed forces caused by explosions under their military vehicles.
Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) on or near roadways continue to kill or wound soldiers of many nations. So do land mines and rockets launched at the underside of military vehicles. The U.S. Army would like its vehicle designers to better protect soldiers from those explosions. But first, local professor Frank Pintar says the Army and its academic partners are in the fourth year of a project to create the military equivalent of a car industry crash-test dummy.
“We put a crash-test dummy in a car and we crash the car. Then, the car”s five-star rating, if you will, is based on what the dummy senses, as opposed to what the car looks like. So, the military is also doing that,” Pintar says.