Studying the performance of American football helmet in absorbing the energy of impact based on finite element method

Date

2016-08-12

Authors

Ahmadisoleymani, Seyed Saeed

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Abstract

Throughout the history of sports, injuries limiting the career life of the athletes have been the leading concern of the sport authorities. These injuries are more extensive in sports in which athletes are in severe contact with each. Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (MTBI), concussion, widely occurs in American football because of the frequent strokes to players’ heads. Concussion includes several types of neurological dysfunctions such as headache, dizziness, confusion, blurred vision, delayed reaction time and etc. Lots of the related studies have focused on understanding different aspects of concussion and improving the protective performance of the helmet, so that the dose and severity of the injury in players is reduced. Researches in this area can be classified as two major methods: experimental studies and Finite Element Modeling (FEM) simulations. In experiments, researchers have tried to record head impacts or reconstruct the severe collisions using the game videos in the laboratory conditions. They have used the Hybrid III dummy in order to study the effects of the different impact parameters such as direction, velocity, region of the head being hit and etc. Above mentioned impact parameters have been also examined using FEM simulations. Researchers have applied the results of experimental tests including linear and rotational acceleration in order to study the brain deformation responses to different types of impacts. In order to limit the severity and frequency of injury, various helmets have been designed to protect player’s head by absorbing the energy of the impact. This absorbency is mainly achieved by the padding system inside the helmet which includes energy absorbing and comfort foams and inflatable air surrounding the foams. In a recent study at Texas Tech University, an experiment was performed on a Riddell Youth Revolution Speed helmet to analyze the effect of head size on capability of the helmet in attenuating the impacts. It was found that headform size would affect the helmet performance. In the current study, a three dimensional finite element (FE) model has been developed based on the above mentioned experiment. The purpose of this study is to develop and validate the FE model based on the experimental results, regarding the effect of headform size on performance of the helmet.

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Keywords

Ameican football helmet, Concussions, Finite element modelling, LS-DYNA

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