Materials such as paper, film, magnetic tape and soft polymers were not designed to be load bearing materials, yet we often use them in such a capacity. Our focus is to understand and predict the behavior of these materials, with the goal of improving the reliability of the mechanisms that must handle them.
Helmets consist of a composite shell, a polystyrene foam liner, and a comfort liner.
Test drops are conducted at Gentex to study the impact attenuation of various helmet material and design combinations. In this project, the Abaqus Explicit code is used to model the helmet and headform assembly impacting a rigid barrier. Time traces of deformation, velocity and acceleration are obtained. Head injury criteria are thus examined based on the software. Material testing, both static and dynamic, have been conducted to obtain material behavior that has been input into the Abaqus code.