Development and Implementation of High Fidelity Human Models for the Investigation of Blast and Non-Penetrating Projectile Impact

Military operations abroad have highlighted the effects of several types of physical traumas including traumatic brain injury and behind armor blunt trauma. While previous approaches toward understanding and mitigating trauma caused by blast or blunt impact relied upon physical testing of animal subjects, post mortem human subjects, or human tissue surrogates, recent advances in computational capability have spurred a growing area of research in computational investigations into wound injury and its mitigation. The development of high-fidelity human torso and head-neck-torso models are presented here. These models are employed in blast and non-penetrating projectile impact simulations in order to demonstrate the value of the models and the associated simulation approach in assessing potential wound injury mechanisms and conducting relative merit assessments of armor designs. Also, a study comparing truncated head-neck and torso models to the more complete head-neck-torso model is conducted in order to assess the appropriateness of employing truncated models. The results of this study suggest that, in general, the use of truncated models does not necessarily capture the complete physical behavior of blast impact in comparison to the more complete head-neck-torso model and full human models may be invaluable to future research of physical trauma