From tumbles to football handles, most hits to the head happen at odd points. Furthermore, those effects trigger concurrent straight and rotational head movements. The pivoting development specifically causes shear strain, which is particularly harmful to the mind.
Another lightweight froth material could take most or all of that strain off the cerebrum.
Created by College of Wisconsin-Madison designs, the new material—an upwardly adjusted carbon nanotube froth—can scatter a tremendous measure of rotational dynamic energy from an effect. What’s more, as a head protector lining material, it could relieve, or even forestall, horrible mind wounds by debilitating rotational motor energy before it arrives at the cerebrum.
Truth be told, the new material is multiple times greater at engrossing shear strain than the froth at present utilized in U.S. military battle head protector liners. The group portrayed the material and its exceptional properties in a paper distributed on December 7, 2023, in the journal Exploratory Mechanics.
“This material holds a lot of promise for creating new helmets that are significantly better at preventing concussions.”
Ramathasan Thevamaran, a UW–Madison assistant professor of mechanical engineering who led the research.
“This material shows extraordinary commitment to empowering new protective caps that are radically better at forestalling blackouts,” says Ramathasan Thevamaran, a UW-Madison partner teacher of mechanical design who drove the exploration.
Ph.D. understudy Bhanugoban Maheswaran tests the inwardly adjusted carbon nanotube froths in Partner Teacher Ramathasan Thevamaran’s lab. Credit: Photograph by Joel Hallberg
Why it works
At present, a few caps endeavor to diminish rotational movement from influences by utilizing a layer that permits a sliding movement to happen between the wearer’s head and the protective cap’s external shell. In any case, Thevamaran says these moving layers don’t disperse energy from shear strain; surprisingly more terrible, they will quite often stick when they’re seriously compacted—as such, following a blow.
Since it doesn’t depend on sliding layers, the new material evades these inadequacies.
Far and away superior, when it’s compacted, the material gets strangely better at obliging shear and scattering energy from an effect, Thevamaran says.
This advance expands on his past exploration of inwardly adjusted carbon nanotube froths, in which his group exhibited the material’s exceptional shock-engrossing capacities. The material consists of carbon nanotubes—carbon chambers only one iota thick in each layer—that are painstakingly organized into firmly pressed chamber structures. The material’s original engineering, which has interesting underlying highlights across numerous length scales, gives the material its extraordinary properties.
Furthermore, the scientists as of late have shown that their upward-adjusted carbon nanotube froths displayed remarkable warm conductivity and diffusivity, which would empower a cap liner made of the material to keep the wearer’s head cool in hot conditions.
Combined with its slimness, that cooling ability makes the new material comparable to graphite froth and makes it alluring for applications where less weight is significant. Past cap liners, the material could likewise be utilized in electronic bundling and electronic frameworks to both safeguard against shocks and keep hardware cool.
More information: B. Maheswaran et al. Mitigating Oblique Impacts by Unraveling of Buckled Carbon Nanotubes in Helmet Liners, Experimental Mechanics (2023). DOI: 10.1007/s11340-023-01013-1
