Developed by College of Wisconsin-Madison engineers, a light-weight, ultra-shock-absorbing foam might vastly enhance helmets designed to guard folks from robust blows.
The brand new materials displays 18 occasions greater particular vitality absorption than the froth presently utilized in U.S. navy fight helmet liners, in addition to having a lot larger power and stiffness, which might permit it to supply improved impression safety.
Bodily forces from an impression can inflict trauma within the mind, inflicting a concussion. However helmet supplies which can be higher at absorbing and dissipating this kinetic vitality earlier than it reaches the mind might assist mitigate, and even forestall, concussions and different traumatic mind accidents.
The researchers’ {industry} companion, helmet producer Workforce Wendy, is experimenting with the brand new materials in a helmet liner prototype to research its efficiency in real-world situations.
“This new materials holds great potential for vitality absorption and thus impression mitigation, which in flip ought to considerably decrease the chance of mind harm,” says Ramathasan Thevamaran, a UW-Madison professor of engineering physics who led the analysis.
The group detailed its advance in a research revealed just lately within the journal Excessive Mechanics Letters.
The brand new materials is an architected, vertically aligned carbon nanotube foam. To create it, the researchers began with carbon nanotubes — carbon cylinders only one atom thick in every layer — as the essential constructing blocks.
Carbon nanotubes have already got distinctive mechanical properties, and to additional improve their efficiency, the researchers designed a cloth with distinctive structural options throughout a number of size scales. The fabric’s novel structure consists of quite a few micrometer-scale cylinder constructions, every product of many carbon nanotubes.
Discovering the brand new foam’s final optimum design parameters — such because the thickness of the cylinders, their internal diameter and the hole between adjoining cylinders — was no small process. The researchers systematically carried out experiments the place they assorted every parameter and studied all of the potential combos.
“So we took just a few completely different thicknesses, after which examined that with each diameter dimension and each potential hole, and so forth,” Thevamaran says. “Altogether, we checked out 60 completely different combos and carried out three assessments on every pattern, so 180 experiments went into this research.”
They uncovered a transparent winner. Cylinders with a thickness of 10 micrometers or much less, organized shut to one another, produced a foam with the perfect shock-absorbing properties.
“I anticipated the general properties to enhance as a consequence of our interactive structure, however I used to be stunned by how dramatically the properties had been enhanced when the cylinders had been 10 micrometers thick,” Thevamaran says. “It was as a consequence of an uncommon dimension impact that emerged within the process-structure-property relations. The impact was very pronounced, and it turned out to be fairly advantageous for the properties we had been concentrating on.”
As well as, the brand new materials can stay robustly shock-absorbing at each very excessive and really low temperatures due to its carbon nanotube constructing blocks, making it helpful for functions in a variety of utmost environments.
The researchers, together with Komal Chawla, UW-Madison postdoctoral analysis affiliate, and graduate college students Abhishek Gupta and Abhijeet S. Bhardwaj, are patenting their innovation by means of the Wisconsin Alumni Analysis Basis. The university-industry collaboration was a part of the UW¬-Madison-led PANTHER program, an interdisciplinary analysis initiative that’s creating options to allow higher detection and prevention of traumatic mind accidents.
Grants from the U.S. Workplace of Naval Analysis (N000142112044) and the Military Analysis Workplace (W911NF2010160) supported the analysis.
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Supplies offered by College of Wisconsin-Madison. Authentic written by Adam Malecek. Be aware: Content material could also be edited for type and size.
