Crash test laboratory at Politecnico di Milano, from motorcycles to airplanes

In the Campus Bovisa , the heart of the historic industrial area of ​​the city of Milan, there is a unique laboratory in the world: LaST, the Transport Safety Laboratory of Politecnico di Milano, is located in an old industrial building that belonged to Ceretti and Tanfani and is part of the Department of Aerospace Sciences and Technologies .

As published on focus.it in this video, within the LaST researchers are studying how to reduce the risk of injury to occupants of a means of transport, from cars to trains and even helicopters .

The activities of the laboratory deal with passive and active safety. Politecnico has been one of the pioneers in the field since the 1960s and the history of LaST begins in those years, as the first academic crash test laboratory in Italy.

Researchers and students gravitating around LaST are involved in evaluating the behavior of structures during an impact, from single component to full-scale vehicles or aircraft, modeling of catastrophic events and the behavior of the human body. For example, energy absorption tests are carried out on objects that are accelerated and then dynamically destroyed to evaluate their behavior during impact; deceleration tests for components that are not directly involved in the impact but that receive the effects, such as car seats; or even bird impact tests, an increasingly serious risk given the growth in air traffic.

This type of research activity Politecnico di Milano also makes use of the collaboration of many companies in the transport sector , for shared projects ranging from design to certification of products that then enter circulation on our roads and in our skies.