Experimentally linking head kinematics to brain deformation

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) research is used to study the effects of brain injuries and the rehabilitations for them. TBI contributes to major cause of disability and deaths quantifying up to 30% of all the head injuries. To mimic real world impact to understand the mechanism of injury head-surrogate models are used. This thesis describes a method to record head kinematics from acceleration and angular rate sensors of head-brain surrogate model for blast and blunt injury. This methodology is validated through experimental testing. To get a better insight of the head kinematics experienced by a real skull a drop tower is used to delivered controlled impacts to the head model. The loading conditions include velocities at 1.3, and 1.5 m/s, impact locations at the crown and the forehead of the skull and with the brain composition being a 20% ballistics gelatin. The output head kinematics were then combined with brain deformation data and linked to head injury criteria. The strain, accelerometer and angular rate measurements were done using NI cDAQ-9188 Data Acquisition System combined with LabVIEW. Then, the data was analyzed in MATLAB