Abstract
Head injury is a growing concern within contact sports, including American football. Computational tools such as finite element (FE) models provide an avenue for researchers to study, and potentially optimize safety tools, such as helmets. The goal of this study was to develop an accurate representative helmet model that could be used in further study of head injury to mitigate the toll of concussions in contact sports. An FE model of a Schutt Air XP Pro football helmet was developed through three major steps: geometry development, material characterization, and model validation. The fully assembled helmet model was fit onto a Hybrid III dummy head–neck model and National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment (NOCSAE) head model and validated through a series of 67 representative impacts similar to those experienced by a football player. The kinematic and kinetic response of the model was compared to the response of the physical experiments, which included force, head linear acceleration, head angular velocity, and carriage acceleration. The outputs between the model and the physical tests were quantitatively evaluated using CORelation and Analysis (CORA), amounting to an overall averaged score of 0.76. The model described in this study has been extensively validated and can function as a building block for innovation in player safety.
Highlights
Sports-related head injury is a growing concern within the US, where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 1.6 million to 3.8 million concussions occur in sports annually.[3]
Given existing anthropomorphic test dummies (ATDs) and human body models, and established injury criteria based on acceleration or strain, this model can be viewed as another tool for engineers and biomechanists to advance head injury research
The two different ATD head forms did not have a definitive impact on comparisons
Summary
Sports-related head injury is a growing concern within the US, where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 1.6 million to 3.8 million concussions occur in sports annually.[3]. There are approximately 4.2 million total football participants in the US each year among youth, high school, collegiate, professional, and other organized organizations, which equates to one of the highest participation rates of sports in the US.[13,26] Public attention on football is justified, as it has one of the nation’s highest risks of concussion among sports.[3,8,9,27,30,39,44] The increased awareness of concussion risk has translated to a greater emphasis on technique (e.g. head-up tackling rather than head-first tackling),[7] rule changes (e.g. penalties for helmet-tohelmet contact), and engineering research and development focused on protective equipment.[40,54].
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