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Creationeering

Modeling, Designing, and Making Helmets for Safety

What’s Involved in this Research?

We are designing a new, safer, football helmet that will reduce brain damage when players impact each other. Our approach entails two different convergent paths: decreasing brain damage using high-performance computing methods in order to simulate football impacts and applying bio-inspired designs to the football helmets.

Current football helmets are designed to save players from skull fracture, but they do not protect from concussions or long-term Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). Today’s helmets admit brain damage after impacts are made on the football field. Historically, they have not focused on stopping concussions or any kind of brain damage in the past. We are using simulation-based design techniques where a scan of a real human brain is placed into helmets electronically and then the helmets are digitally collided into each other on a computer to help us redesign helmets.


How Students Benefit

By understanding modeling, computational analysis, and experimental procedures, a student will learn how the scientific method is used to analyze a design or engineering product that is structural in nature.

Several undergraduate and graduate students have conducted research on this project, which includes the following:

  • using finite element simulations to design a novel facemask that has been patented and supported by the NFL
  • currently using finite element simulations to redesign the entire football helmet system and its separate components
  • examining 3D printing methods to optimize the structural components of the helmets
  • trying to experimentally quantify different measurements on a football helmet and send the signals to the sidelines to better assess the state of impact in real time

Research Professors

Dr. Feng Wang
B.E., M.S., Ph.D.
Professor of Computer Engineering
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Dr. Carl Pettiford
B.S, M.S., Ph.D.
Associate Dean
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Dr. Ephraim Zegeye
B.S., M.S., Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering
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Dr. Kyung Kyoon Bae
B.S., M.S., Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering
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Impact on Society

This work has a chance to affect every future helmet for football, baseball, hockey, etc.


Articles

Johnson, Kyle, Mark F. Horstemeyer, Souma Chowdhury, and Yuxiong Mao. “Facemask.” U.S. Patent Application 29/592,988, filed October 23, 2018.

Horstemeyer, M.F., Mississippi State University, 2018. Shock Mitigating Materials and Methods Utilizing Sutures. U.S. Patent Application 15/670,879.

Prabhu, Rajkumar, MF Horstemeyer, GA Rush, “Shock Wave Mitigating Helmets,” US Patent 20.150.305.427, 2015.

Johnson, K. L., S. Chowdhury, W. B. Lawrimore, Y. Mao, A. Mehmani, R. Prabhu, G. A. Rush, and M. F. Horstemeyer. “Constrained topological optimization of a football helmet facemask based on brain response.” Materials & Design 111, 108-118, 2016.

Johnson, K.L., Trim, M.W., Horstemeyer, M.F., Lee, N., Williams, L.N., Liao, J., Rhee, H., Prabhu, R., “Geometric effects on stress wave propagation,” J. Biomechanical Engineering, Vol. 136, Issue 2, Article number 021023, 2014.

Rush, G.A., Prabhu, R., Rush III, G.A., Williams, L.N., Horstemeyer, M.F. Modified Drop Tower Impact Tests for American Football Helmets. J. Vis. Exp. (120), e53929, doi:10.3791/53929, 2017.

Francis, D.K., Bouvard, J.L., Hammi, Y., Horstemeyer, M.F., “Formulation of a damage internal state variable model for amorphous glassy polymers,” Int Journal of Solids and Structures, Vol. 51, Issue 15-16,  pp. 2765-2776, 2014.

Bouvard, J.L., Francis, D.K., Tschopp, M.A., Marin, E.B., Bammann, D.J., and Horstemeyer, M.F., “An internal state variable material model for predicting the time, thermomechanical, and stress state dependence of amorphous glassy polymers under large deformation,”   Int. Journal of Plasticity 42 , pp. 168-193, 2013.

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