Title: Further investigation of the applicability of head injury criterion and the associated scaling laws with finite element modelling

Authors: Shijie Ruan; Wei Zhao; Haiyan Li; Shihai Cui; Lijuan He

Addresses: College of Mechanical Engineering, Tianjin University of Science and Technology, Tianjin 30022, China ' College of Mechanical Engineering, Tianjin University of Science and Technology, Tianjin 30022, China ' College of Mechanical Engineering, Tianjin University of Science and Technology, Tianjin 30022, China ' College of Mechanical Engineering, Tianjin University of Science and Technology, Tianjin 30022, China ' College of Mechanical Engineering, Tianjin University of Science and Technology, Tianjin 30022, China

Abstract: To test the applicability of Head Injury Criterion (HIC), three different-sized (5th, 50th, 95th percentile) finite element head models were developed from medical CT scan images of living humans. These models were scaled to generate six scaled models. The skulls of these nine models were defined as deformable and rigid bodies, respectively. It was found that both coup and contrecoup pressures decreased from the smaller head to the larger one when the skulls were deformable; while the opposite trends were found when the skulls were defined as rigid bodies. Maximum principal strains and maximum share stresses increased from the smaller head to the larger one for both deformable and rigid skulls with much larger increases in the rigid skull cases. It also found that there were larger discrepancies in intracranial responses between scaled models and the original ones, which invalidate the scaling laws used in biomechanical injury studies.

Keywords: HIC; head injury criteria; scaling laws; head sizes; intracranial responses; finite element model.

DOI: 10.1504/IJVS.2019.101294

International Journal of Vehicle Safety, 2019 Vol.11 No.1, pp.19 - 36

Received: 19 Dec 2018
Accepted: 31 Dec 2018
Published online: 30 Jul 2019 *

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