The fatal effect of shock waves on the head of a person wearing a polyurea-reinforced ballistic helmet

Comput Methods Biomech Biomed Engin. 2023 Dec 7:1-14. doi: 10.1080/10255842.2023.2285240. Online ahead of print.ABSTRACTBallistic helmets are an important part of personal protective equipment in war and are specifically designed to protect a person's head. The future trend is to improve the protective performance of helmets through the use of lightweight coatings, and polyurea, as one of the hottest elastomeric polymer coating materials in recent years, has excellent physical properties, especially its ability to improve the target's protection against blast shock waves. Therefore, in this study, using a validated head model, a blast impact model under the fluid-solid coupling method was constructed to study the effect of blast wave on the model and to analyse its effect on intracranial pressure and skull deformation. In addition, the effect of the position of the polyurea lightweight protective coating on the bending deformation of the skull under the effect of the blast wave was also investigated. The results showed that the polyurea coating could reduce the skull deformation under the same surface density condition. However, spraying polyurea on the blast surface of the helmet's blast-facing surface does not effectively reduce skull deformation caused by blast waves.PMID:38062885 | DOI:10.1080/10255842.2023.2285240
Source: Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering - Category: Biomedical Engineering Authors: Source Type: research