Use of human injury models to design and evaluate office layouts to reduce injuries from blast

In terrorist bombings of buildings, often the primary cause of death and serious injury to occupants is trauma caused by the impacts of glass and blunt objects (like file cabinets). As part of an effort to better design office spaces, K and C and BEI have developed an analytic model for predicting blunt trauma injuries within an office space subjected to an airblast. The analytic model employed is based on adapting the human injury prediction modeling techniques employed in studying the crashworthiness of vehicles. The airblast propagated into the room by a particular bomb scenario is used to accelerate the various objects within the room as well as the occupants. The analytic simulation is used to calculate the impacts and interactions of the various objects and occupants. Typical injury prediction measures, such as the Head Injury Criteria (HIC) and Thoracic Trauma Injury (TTI) are used to evaluate the risks of a particular blast scenario.