Experimental and theoretical investigation of cervical spine under impact acceleration

The special experimental setup for a study of the head-neck system dynamics during impulse acceleration, which arises in the case of the ground and air vehicle crushes, was elaborated. Based on experimental results the authors proposed the simple mechanical model of the “head-neck” system with eight degrees of freedom, which are the rotation angles of the head and seven cervical vertebrae. For the search of the unknown model parameters the minimization of the discordance between experimental and theoretical results was used. In doing so the Nelder-Mead method was applied.