Frangible Surrogate Leg

The FSL or ‘Frangible Surrogate Leg’ is designed to mimic the behaviour of a human leg under the rapid loading experienced when you step on an anti-personnel landmine or are in a vehicle hit by an IED.

By having bones that break at the same levels and in the same way as human bones and by taking measurements of the forces experienced, it provides invaluable information to both clinicians and engineers. This data will help in the development of systems to protect the lower limb for both mounted and dismounted personnel in areas in which landmines and buried IEDs may be found.

The FSL has a knee joint bracket that allows it to directly replace the lower limb of a Crash Test Dummy or to attach into other purpose built rigs for landmine research. The FSL can be x-rayed both before and after tests to see the detail of the internal bony damage before it is removed from its boot or damaged by further handling. If required it can also be CT scanned for full clinical analysis.

The FSL can be used as a purely physical model or it can be instrumented to provide the both axial loading and bending moments which can be used to correlate the observed mode of failure.

The FSL is a NATO approved tool for landmine footwear research and is now being employed in vehicle tests to provide better clinical data than the mechanical legs of the Hybrid III Crash test Dummy.