Project Areas

Biomechanics

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Head Injury Modelling

Head injury is the cause of 50% of all automotive related fatalities and is also a common injury among cyclists. CIC's advanced research focuses on the achievement of optimum head protection, by predicting accurately the severity of head injuries. Our approach is to give more insight into the underlying head injury mechanisms of brain injury using a combination of techniques including clinical observations, pathological examinations, accident reconstructions, and finite element modelling.

Finite element models of the head are developed in the LS-DYNA explicit finite element code to analyse three important head injury mechanisms. These are:

• brain tissue shearing, leading to diffuse axonal injury
• bridging vein tearing, leading to various haemorrhaging
• brain tissue contact contusions

During the analyses, various parameters are monitored to establish the severity of the various injury mechanisms:

• strains to determine the severity of diffuse axonal injury and surface contusions
• elongation of spring elements to monitor the severity of bridging vein tearing

Tissue failure criteria are developed to determine the severity of the analysed injuries.

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