Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year. (2017-2018 to 2022-2023)

DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION OF AN OMNI-DIRECTIONAL BIOFIDELIC THREE-DIMENSIONAL SURROGATE NECK FOR HELMET AND AUTOMOTIVE CRASH TESTING

Injuries to the head and neck result in catastrophic disability and the disruptions in quality of life are significant, as are costs to the injured persons, their families and the medical systems and societies in which these injuries happen. The head and neck protect the most important elements of the central nervous system, the brain and spinal cord. Surrogate necks of various designs are used to simulate the response of the healthy human neck, and thus to control and prescribe head motion and head impacts in response to torso impact or acceleration and they control the motion of a test head form after impact to the head form. Surrogate necks are used in automotive crash testing and, increasingly, these neck forms are also being used in helmet test standards and test rigs. This is because they allow and control head rotation and rotational acceleration of the head and brain is increasingly studied as it has been established to play a central role in concussion and more serious injuries to the brain.
These necks are also used in head-first impact scenarios to study devices designed to prevent cervical spine injuries in head first impacts (such as those occurring in head-to-roof impacts in automotive rollovers and in head to ground, player, obstacle etc. during sports such as mountain biking and hockey). The most common surrogate neck used in these contexts is the Hybrid III dummy neck is composed of a rubber column with embedded metal discs and with sections of the rubber removed to allow flexibility in various directions. Specialized automotive dummy necks have been designed for low-speed impacts and motorcycle crash testing, but we are unaware of one designed for head-first impacts or one designed to have omni-directional biofidelic response. Such a device will play a key role in preventing the most serious and catastrophic injuries to the central nervous system (i.e. both SCI and TBI). Therefore, it is our objective to design, build and characterize a three-dimensional mechanical model of the cervical spine that exhibits humanlike kinematics and kinetics, and temporal characteristics. The mechanical spine will reproduce humanlike response in axial impacts, as well as in any combination of axial loading with frontal, transverse and sagittal plane components. We will refer to this neck as the ODN (Omni-Directional-Neck).