Bicycle helmets are widely used as safety devices, especially among children. The construction of these safety devices was, until recently, unregulated and the certification of these devices depended upon several different standards such... more
Bicycle helmets are widely used as safety devices, especially among children. The construction of these safety devices was, until recently, unregulated and the certification of these devices depended upon several different standards such as ASTM, ANSI and SNELL. These standards describe a series of qualifications a helmet must satisfy in order to be certified. Improvements in helmet design can be determined early in the development stage through the use of finite element studies. This will result in safer helmets that are tested over the entire helmet and range of feasible orientations. The present study was designed to examine the level of protection at various impact locations and the effects of altering the geometry and material. The finite element technique was used because of its capability to simulate irregular geometry and conduct parametric study
With the introduction of airbags and the use of tempered glass in side windows, the incidence of penetrating eye injuries has been reported to be increasing. In this paper we examine whether tempered glass fargments accelerated by an... more
With the introduction of airbags and the use of tempered glass in side windows, the incidence of penetrating eye injuries has been reported to be increasing. In this paper we examine whether tempered glass fargments accelerated by an airbag can penetrate the eye. Our studies include modeling of the airbag interaction with tempered glass fragments to determine imparted velocity for a given fragment size. MADYMO was used to model the airbag-to-tempered glass fragment interaction and determine expected velocities. A methodology was development to utilize the velocities determined from MADYMO as input to finite element analyses to evaluate eye penetration by the glass fragments in conjunction with the development of a finite element model of the eye and socket. Results show that the high velocities can be achieved by large tempered glass fragments from the airbag interaction.
