Advisor

Injury to the medial collateral ligament (MCL) and anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) are common when knees are subjected to loading from the lateral direction. These types of injuries occur often in sports and are also common in vehicle-pedestrian collisions. Previously, the Injury Biomechanics Research Laboratory (IBRL) at The Ohio State University has developed instrumentation for anterior tibia impacts, which included instrumentation to measure the posterior cruciate ligament (PCL) stretch. The objective of this research was to take knowledge gleamed from the frontal testing to develop an instrumentation technique for lateral impact testing of the knee, focusing on MCL and ACL stretch and injury. The goal of this study was to develop and verify instrumentation that can be used in future studies on ligament tears and avulsions on post-mortem human subjects (PMHS). This research also looked to accurately measure the angle between the tibia and the femur during impact and identify the time of injury for both ligament and bone failures. Instrumentation techniques using micro-differential variable reluctance transducers (Micro-DVRTs) were used to measure stretch in the ligaments due to the confined space within the kne