Education

Ohio State University College of Engineering

Career Description

I am a mechanical engineering student, and my area of research is called injury biomechanics. I chose mechanical engineering because I liked to take things apart and learn how they work when I was younger. I decided taking things apart sounded like a fun job and that is one of the many jobs I can have as a mechanical engineer. I have had jobs working on replacement knees and hips, race cars, and, in an indirect way right now, crash test dummies.

Biomechanics is the study of the body. Most people don't understand why a mechanical engineer would be working on or with people. The body is actually very mechanical in everything, from how the joints work, to how the heart works. It's a perfect "machine" for mechanical engineers to study just like airplanes and computers. Injury biomechanics, which is my specific area of study, is a study of how the body is injured.

My research project is looking at how the knee is injured when people are in a front-end car accident. Crash test dummies are used in actual crash testing to measure what a real person would experience in a similar car crash. We use post mortem human subject (PMHS) legs to learn how much of an impact the knee can handle before it is injured.

Specifically, we're studying the posterior cruciate ligament (PCL) which is one of the internal ligaments that stabilizes the knee. In frontal car crashes, the passenger or driver will slide forward which causes their knees to impact the dash, which can cause the PCL to be torn. Since ligament tears are hard to fix we want to try to stop or minimize these types of injuries. We test the PMHS legs by impacting them with a pneumatic ram, and then, monitor the reaction to the impact with sensors. The sensors record how much force we're applying to the femur, how much the PCL is stretching, and how much the tibia is moving. We will take what we learn from this testing to change how the crash test dummies are instrumented and used.

This type of research is really interesting and exciting! We hope to make cars safer for everybody in the future. This is just one of the many fun things that I get to do as a mechanical engineer.