Chest compression is a parameter of injury criteria assessment for human beings. Additionally, it is used to find the external compression response as a result of vehicle crashes, falls, or sporting impacts. This behavioral feature is described by many deterministic models related to specific experimental tests, hindering distinct scenarios. The present study evaluates the energy absorbed as a function of rib compression. The proposed model was obtained from three different computed tomography (CT) studies. The anthropometric values are interpolated to obtain a parametric curve for a human rib's average size. The computed results are compared against an STL-DICOM® file used to obtain a virtual reconstruction of one rib. A numerical model of the behavior of the thorax displacement expressed injury in the human rib model's stiffness. The proposed model is used to determine the correlation of the input payload versus the numerical stiffness value. The outcome is confirmed by numerical analyses applied to a virtual human rib reconstruction.
Keywords: CT; FEM; biomechanics; rib stiffness.