Case Study: Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center achieves validated, high-fidelity finite-element human body models for vehicle crash simulation with Altair HyperWorks

Using HyperWorks to Develop Human Body Models for Vehicle Crash Simulation

Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center’s Center of Injury Biomechanics (CIB) faced the challenge of developing highly detailed finite-element human body models for vehicle crash simulation to better understand injury mechanisms across adults, children and infants. To support the Global Human Body Modeling Consortium (GHBMC) work led in part by Wake Forest, the team partnered with Altair and used the HyperWorks suite—specifically HyperMesh, HyperMorph and RADIOSS—to build, morph and validate the complex human body FE models.

Altair’s HyperWorks tools enabled Wake Forest to integrate regional COE models into full-body models, produce a validated 50th percentile male (M50) model with 2.2 million elements and 1.3 million nodes, and validate the model for 38% of crash‑induced injuries (with sufficient detail to simulate ~80% of injury types). Using HyperMesh/HyperMorph the team also generated reduced 150,000‑element models that run about 50% faster and applied scaling methods to create other percentile variants—demonstrating Altair’s platform delivered measurable increases in modeling fidelity, validation coverage, and simulation efficiency.

Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center

Scott Gayzik

Assistant Professor Center for Injury Biomechanics