Play contact sports for any length of time and at one point or another you’re probably going to have your ‘bell rung’ by a powerful blow to the head from a hard hit or fall.
Play contact sports for any length of time and at one point or another you’re probably going to have your ‘bell rung’ by a powerful blow to the head from a hard hit or fall. Rising awareness of the severe, abiding repercussions of strong impacts to the head—concussions, mild traumatic brain injury, neurological disorders—have led scientists to focus on what exactly happens inside a skull during a big hit.
Mehmet Kurt, a mechanical engineer at Stevens Institute of Technology who studies the biomechanics of the brain and the skull at rest and during rapid head movements, has now bioengineered simulations that track how the brain behaves upon impact, reconstructing the inertial stresses and strains that prevail inside a brain that’s just been hit hard from the side.
“The brain not only rings, but it has a distinct pattern of ringing when the head is hit from the side and experiences rotational acceleration,” said Kurt, whose work may not only have implications for brain injury assessment, but for sports helmet makers in search of measurable parameters that can simply distinguish ‘concussion’ from ‘no concussion’ to help the industry set safety standards. The paper appears in the July 30 issue of Physics Review Applied.
Read more at Stevens Institute of Technology
