Abstract
Over the past few years, foam materials have been increasingly used in the passive safety of sport fields, to mitigate the risk of crash injury. Currently, the passive safety certification process of these materials represents an expensive and time-consuming task, since a considerable number of impact tests on material samples have to be carried out by an ad hoc testing apparatus. To overcome this difficulty and speed up the design process of new protective devices, a virtual model for the low-velocity impact behaviour of foam protective mats is needed. In this study a modelling approach based on the mesh-free Element Galerkin method was developed to investigate the impact behaviour of ethylene-vinyl acetate (EVA) foam protective mats. The main advantage of this novel technique is that the difficulties related to the computational mesh distortion and caused by the large deformation of the foam material are avoided and a good accuracy is achieved at a relatively low computational cost. The numerical model was validated statistically by comparing numerical and experimental acceleration data acquired during a series of impact events on EVA foam mats of various thicknesses. The findings of this study are useful for the design and improvement of foam protective devices and allow for optimizing sports fields’ facilities by reducing head injury risk by a reliable computational method.
Highlights
Among all sports injuries, head injuries represent the most severe risks to athletes’ health.Nowadays, serious or fatal accidents are not uncommon on sports fields: in 2015, a 21-year-old footballer died in Argentina’s fifth tier after his head collided with a concrete wall at the edge of the pitch [1]
According to the ASTM F1292 standard [11], a hemispherical missile with 160 mm diameter and a mass of 4.6 kg, equipped with 500 g uniaxial accelerometer, was dropped from a height on the foam pad, which was fixed by an adhesive tape on a steel anvil
Only the acceleration values belonging to belonging to the time range [ti, tf] derived from the algorithm used to calculate the head injury criterion (HIC) index were the time range [ti, tf ] derived from the algorithm used to calculate the HIC index were considered
Summary
Serious or fatal accidents are not uncommon on sports fields: in 2015, a 21-year-old footballer died in Argentina’s fifth tier after his head collided with a concrete wall at the edge of the pitch [1]. The protection of athletes when they collide with barriers is a critical issue for the improvement of passive safety in sports fields. Current football requirements prevent the risk of impact for the athlete only by prescribing a minimum distance of dangerous equipment from the boundary lines of the playing pitch. They do not make mention of the physical behaviours
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