Developed by College of Wisconsin-Madison engineers, a light-weight, ultra-shock-absorbing foam might vastly enhance helmets designed to guard folks from sturdy blows.
The brand new materials reveals 18 occasions increased particular vitality absorption than the froth presently utilized in U.S. navy fight helmet liners, in addition to having a lot better power and stiffness, which might enable it to offer improved impression safety.
Bodily forces from an impression can inflict trauma within the mind, inflicting a concussion. However helmet supplies which are 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} associate, helmet producer Staff Wendy, is experimenting with the brand new materials in a helmet liner prototype to analyze its efficiency in real-world eventualities.
“This new materials holds great potential for vitality absorption and thus impression mitigation, which in flip ought to considerably decrease the probability of mind harm,” says Ramathasan Thevamaran, a UW-Madison professor of engineering physics who led the analysis.
The crew detailed its advance in a examine 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 fundamental 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 fabricated from many carbon nanotubes.
Discovering the brand new foam’s final optimum design parameters — such because the thickness of the cylinders, their interior diameter and the hole between adjoining cylinders — was no small process. The researchers systematically carried out experiments the place they various every parameter and studied all of the doable combos.
“So we took a number of completely different thicknesses, after which examined that with each diameter dimension and each doable hole, and so forth,” Thevamaran says. “Altogether, we checked out 60 completely different combos and carried out three checks on every pattern, so 180 experiments went into this examine.”
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 resulting from our interactive structure, however I used to be shocked by how dramatically the properties have been enhanced when the cylinders have been 10 micrometers thick,” Thevamaran says. “It was resulting from 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 have been focusing 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 via 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. Notice: Content material could also be edited for fashion and size.
