COMPARISONS OF SSDT AND CCUBS SEAT TESTS

The successful fielding of occupant protection technologies require understanding their behavior and performance under field-like conditions. To achieve this, the Occupant Protection Laboratory (OPL) at Selfridge Air National Guard Base (SANGB) uses a drop tower, called the Sub-System Drop Tower (SSDT), and a vertical accelerator, called the Crew Compartment Under-Body Blast Simulator (CCUBS). These two systems have the capability to deliver specified acceleration profiles to items, such as blast-mitigating seats under test. To gain confidence that the two systems are producing similar testing conditions for a given system, a series of experiments was designed to determine the existence of a correlation between the two systems. A representative seat and an Anthropomorphic Test Device (ATD) were tested under similar acceleration profiles on both systems. Tests were initially conducted without a payload to determine the testing parameters for each system and to determine the effect of adding a payload. Spectral analysis techniques were employed to determine signal processing metrics and descriptive statistics were calculated to evaluate each systems’ repeatability. The correlation between the two systems was examined to determine how well the systems produced similar responses for a given test condition. This study found that each system was highly repeatable and that the correlation between the two systems was good, but differences did exist.