The humble hospital scanner has been supersized to look inside mangled car wrecks and learn how to make cars safer
The internal components of a modern car can be tricky to pinpoint at the best of times – and once they’ve been subjected to a high-speed impact, the task becomes even more difficult. That’s a problem if you’re a crash researcher who wants to examine the wreck to find out how each element has fared. There’s a risk of compromising the evidence as you pick apart the wreckage.
If only there was a giant version of the kind of X-ray scanners we use to look at bones, it would be possible to get a detailed look inside the vehicle without disturbing it. The Fraunhoffer Society in Germany has such a scanner – one so big it can accommodate cars, aeroplane wings and dodgy shipping containers. This giant scanner enables users to observe the insides of a mangled car in 3D, pinpointing internal structures to within less than a millimetre. This research is vital, as in the event of an impact, a car’s structure typically has less than one-tenth of a second to save the occupants. This detailed knowledge on how all elements perform could be vital in designing safer vehicles.
Although this may seem like another story of phenomenal German engineering, the technology at the heart of it was started by a Nobel Prize-winning Englishman working at a record company in the early 1970s. Godfrey Hounsfield was a researcher for EMI. He figured out that by X-raying an object from several angles, a computer could be used to build an accurate 3D model of its interior. One of
