A possible new design for padding in sports activities helmets may take up as a lot as 25% extra influence than present foams, including further safety from head accidents.
The design, created by researchers on the University of Colorado Boulder, may assist advance foams and padding which were used for many years, bettering security and stopping head accidents.
“The need to protect fragile objects and human bodies is really widespread,” Lawrence Smith, an creator of the research and CU Boulder doctoral graduate mentioned. “It touches transportation, shipping and handling, sports, defense — all industries you’re trying to move things around safely.”
The researchers checked out tips on how to enhance the form of foams present in objects like bike helmets, soccer helmets or packing peanuts by specializing in construction and geometry. They found that their designs may take up roughly six occasions extra vitality than customary foams made out of the identical materials and as much as 25% greater than different related design buildings.
“We’re doing this work to look at the relationship between material geometry and its ability to mitigate impact,” Robert MacCurdy, research creator and CU Boulder professor in mechanical engineering, mentioned. “Of course, it may someday be useful in helmets or pads or crash barriers or bumpers or packing materials, but we haven’t validated its use in any of these things. It’s just samples in the lab.”
Their aim was to seek out methods to enhance influence mitigation, or reduce the influence from an out of doors drive. For instance, utilizing foam inside a soccer helmet to scale back the influence on a participant’s head from a sort out throughout a sport.
“Most folks have tried to make better materials … that have a greater ability to absorb or dissipate impacts,” MacCurdy mentioned. “What we have done in our lab is not that. We have not tried to create some new material, instead what we’ve tried to do is discover a new arrangement of material.”
MacCurdy and Smith used a 3D printer to create testable samples of the froth.
“Bringing (samples) to life with a 3D printer and then smashing them with this test apparatus was really exciting,” Smith mentioned. “A lot of the work we do in research is a little abstract and maybe even theoretical, so to have the chance to take real data on our actual designs in a real impact scenario was really fun.”
By utilizing this design and geometry-driven method, MacCurdy hopes they’ll make foams which have a broader bandwidth for mitigating influence. For instance, when driving a motorcycle, there’s no technique to know within the occasion of a crash if it will likely be low-speed or high-speed. Regardless, the helmet must carry out nicely. The crew of researchers goals to create a geometry that performs nicely regardless of the situation.
MacCurdy mentioned influence mitigation is widespread, and the necessity is common.
“It’s just everywhere,” he mentioned. “I used to play hockey until I had two concussions, for example, and hockey is not thought to be one of the more dangerous sports for concussions, but it affected me. People are talking about that in all kinds of contact sports. I continue to ride my bike and I wear a helmet when I do it, and I ski and I wear a helmet whenever I do that. So I’m hopeful that this approach is relevant in those kinds of applications.”
However, there may be extra work to do to display how the designs work in several situations. The samples the researchers examined had been small, cubic samples with a ten centemeters size on a facet. MacCurdy mentioned they assume they’ll remodel the pattern to suit right into a helmet however want to check it.
Smith mentioned he hopes their analysis generates curiosity and will get extra folks researching in order that ultimately the know-how is commercialized.
“Eventually, (I hope) this tech is commercialized and we can start making everything from helmets to knee pads to transportation packaging safer,” Smith mentioned.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”