Citation

Singh D, Cronin D. Ann. Biomed. Eng. 2019; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Affiliation

Department of MME, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1, Canada. dscronin@mecheng1.uwaterloo.ca.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/s10439-018-02193-x

PMID

30671753

Abstract

Injuries resulting from blast exposure have been increasingly prevalent in recent conflicts, with a particular focus on the risk of head injury. In the current study, a multibody model (GEBOD) was used to investigate the gross kinematics resulting from blast exposure, including longer duration events such as the fall and ground impact. Additionally, detailed planar head models, in the sagittal and transverse planes, were used to model the primary blast wave interaction with the head, and resulting tissue response. For severe blast load cases (scaled distance less than 2), the translational head accelerations during primary blast were found to increase as the height-of-burst (HOB) was lowered, while the HOB was found to have no effect for cases with scaled distance greater than 2. The HOB was found to affect both the magnitude and direction of rotational accelerations, with increasing magnitudes as the HOB deviated from the height of the head. The choice of ground contact stiffness was found to greatly affect the predicted head accelerations during ground impact. For a medium soil ground material, the kinematics during ground impact were greater for scaled distances exceeding 1.5, below which the primary blast produced greater kinematic head response.

Language: en

Keywords

Blast; Brain response; Finite element modeling; Head response; Kinematics; Multi-scale modeling