Ph.D. candidate makes contribution to automotive safety design

Aditya Belwadi arrived in Detroit in September 2003 from Bangalore, India, with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering, determined to study automotive and injury biomechanics at Wayne State University. Today, the 29-year-old research assistant and Ph.D. student has already made a contribution to automotive safety design literature.

For his master's thesis in 2007, Belwadi demonstrated that the human lumbar spine is stronger than prior studies suggested - information that can be captured in finite element human body models that will help engineers design better automotive safety equipment.

To conduct the testing sponsored by Ford Motor Company, Belwadi and his team designed and built a machine to measure impact tolerance dynamics of the spine not addressed in prior studies. No instrument existed before to measure simultaneously the response of the human spine due to combined flexion, compression and shearing forces. While commercially available devices can measure each force individually, Belwadi's device accurately recreates the simultaneous action of these forces as they actually occur in vehicular crashes.

The data values, analysis and descriptions of the loading modes of the human lumbar spine derived from his testing were detailed in a paper Belwadi submitted to the Society for Automotive Engineers (SAE) 2009 World Congress. The paper earned him, his faculty advisor, and BGM Engineering, which collaborated on the mechanical and electronic design and fabrication of the new device, the prestigious Ralph H. Isbrandt Automotive Safety Engineering Award. The award is given to the author of the most outstanding paper on automotive safety engineering.

As deserving as he is of the award, Belwadi - a young man with an engaging smile and effervescent energy - is delighted. It validates the hard work he brought to Wayne State, opening himself to the experience and knowledge of his professors, including Professor of Biomedical and Mechanical Engineering King Hay Yang, Belwadi's faculty advisor during his master's thesis and through his doctoral work, which he expects to complete this year.

"I was always interested in cars and automotive crash-induced injury, racing and everything else," says Belwadi. "When I came to Wayne State to do my master's, I figured biomechanical engineering is very related to automotive safety. What we do here is fascinating because it's a combination of mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, a little bit of physics, and there's biology involved."

As an undergraduate in India, Belwadi ranked first at Rashtreeya Vidyalaya College of Engineering and fifth in the state of Karnataka in mechanical engineering. "I always wanted a Ph.D.; I always wanted to study further," Belwadi says. "Impact biomechanics with Dr. Yang is the best in the country. No other program has such good facilities and such reputable advisors. Professors Albert King and King Yang are the best in the world."

The seed for Belwadi's study stemmed from the concern that the recent introduction of knee airbags by some automotive manufacturers could cause fracture to the spine. "The hypothesis was that in frontal crashes with knee airbags, your knees stop as your upper torso continues to move ahead," Belwadi says. "Originally, they thought that knee airbags would cause a spinal fracture. But that's not what we found."

Belwadi says, "Just because you have knee airbags doesn't mean you'll have a spinal fracture. The lumbar spine is capable of doing more flexion, compression and shear than what was understood before."

Belwadi explains further, "The lumbar spine supports three-fourths of your body weight. This is when you're stationary. But most of the time, we move. When you're walking, you're moving forward, you're moving backward, you're moving sideways. So your center of gravity is moving away. So, it's really three-four times your actual upper torso weight, which is significantly more."

"What happens is the bones adapt." says Belwadi. "They strengthen themselves. They can take more loads. Until a certain age, the lumbar spine is constantly remodeling itself."

Today, Belwadi is working on his doctoral thesis, "Accident Reconstruction and Aortic Injury, Finite Element Modeling, Arterial Material Characterization and Atherosclerosis."

"The aortic project is my dissertation," says Belwadi. "That's another study altogether." Actually, it's a project that's getting his full attention until he completes it this year. He's focusing on fatal aortic injuries in automotive car crashes. Using a combination of finite element human body models and real world crash data, he is trying to understand and mitigate lethal blunt trauma to the aorta.

Belwadi wants people to know that the work he does is not something he does alone, or without help. "I get an immense amount of support from my parents and my wife, Divya" he says. The couple met through a common friend in Detroit. Divya is currently working on a fellowship in pediatric nephrology at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.