Tool to Measure Impact/Crushing Energy

Very few here, I believe. Although two or three come to mind.

What you are doing could ultimately end up in a court of law.

Are your hot dogs certified? MIL-SPEC perhaps?

What you want to do is technically feasible, but, very expensive.

Think of some of the things Myth Busters® does with accelerometers and computers and cameras.

Now figure a way to get it all certified by some government agency so it will be admissible evidence in court.

Much more detail, please.

The liability concerns Lyn brought up deserve attention.

With that in mind....

Have you considered procuring pigs feet from the grocery store/butcher and then sealing it in multiple loose fit bags made of a tough, clean room compliant material?

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Pigs feet are cheap, readily available (in many places), and certainly would give a better indication of injury than a hot dog. If you can find acceptable bags, you will have a much improved model.

My 1st thought when I read this is, we go out of way to keep people out of machinery period. My 2nd thought was the same. I don't care how much damage it can do, I don't want any part of the human person in a machine. Light curtains and other means of safety devices were made for that reason.

A simple DIY crush force testing device is to simply use a rubber tube filled with air or water connected to a pressure gage of the correct range relating to the force involved to cause injury.

If X PSI causes injury anything that creates a pressure over X is obviously a bad place to put your body parts!

A load cell might do the trick, if the circuit can successfully sample the peak force. (Or even measure the thickness of some putty beneath it.)

There are some good Ideas above but what you need to do is a Safety Risk Analysis. You, the operator, machine engineer, management, sit down a brainstorm each area of the machine for cause, effect, and probability of accident. You can use one the ideas above to determine severity and then brainstorm to determine what is needed to fix it. When you have more then one set of eyes examining a process you are lessoning the chance of missing something. Once you have all there areas of concern, you collectively rate them and go after the most severe ones first.

We do a risk analysis on every new machine or process we implement. Do a google search on safety risk analysis and you will see how it's done.

Exactly right, but I'd add that something not considered in a SRA is the human factor involved with whatever kind of impact risk in play here. What are the avenues by which a potentially panicky person could aggravate the impact accident? I've seen many people do exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time over the years. Never underestimate an employee's chances of compounding a bad situation. That's bad risk management too.

If you know the force of impact that will cause damage to a human body part, you can use pieces of Balsa wood. Cut the balsa to the thickness that would break if that particular force is applied. The balsa can be clamped into a bridge like form and keep thinning it down until you have the exact measure you want. One of the nice things about balsa is that it is very inexpensive. No Oink or Moo involved.

Guarding is often function limiting and results in removal of guards by end users if over designed. This is hard to objectively analyse, but should be part of any safety review. Safety experts often neglect this factor, because once liability is met, the human can be ignored. It cannot be ignored.

In any case, the one practical and informative tool (in semi wafer industry) that we often used was a standard cedar pencil (balsa mentioned above is similar). We fully admitted that it would never be a certified test, but still very useful to asses risk and became an internal standard. If the area of interest was accessible and a pencil placed in that area broke while in use, we reassessed both the guarding and control of energy. We would also look at the paint, if it was cut vs dented, we would assess the risk to injury higher if we could not eliminate the 'sharp' edge. Measuring force is not enough, and should be easily calculated via mechanics anyway.

I can envision the use of hot dog, with the best example being the "Sawstop" machine to display this. It is really an impressive video if you have not seen it (search on name). However, you must be looking at severity of injury due to use of the equipment by trained individuals for industrial machines. For example, there are many tools meant to cut, trim, etc., such as a chain saw, jigsaw, handsaw. Could any of these be certified with your current test methods? It will make your head spin if you really think about it too much. As such, it seems that hot dog would probably not pass a random cut test along the sharp edges of the guarding itself and so you may want to think about using that as your standard.

Good luck and take care!