A Study Of Child Head Injury Based On The Series Finite Element Models

Head injuries are often sustained in traffic accidents and children head traumas are themost likely to result in serious consequences and bring great economic losses and burdens tosociety. Therefore, the study of children head injury biomechanics which can improve thedevelopment of protective devices and reduce the injuries has a very important practicalsignificance. So far most researches of children head injuries are established based on theadults’ data and due to the ethical limitations it is difficult to acquire response data by childrenPMHS experiment. At present the child injury criteria adopted by safety assessmentregulations of each country are obtained by the scaling method. However, child head is quitedifferent in terms of geometry, material and anatomical structure when comparing with adult’s,the research accuracy is not high through the scaling method. As a result using the detailedfinite element (FE) model to conduct alternative study is a trend.In this study, a simulation is conducted through the three typical age period children headFE models which have the similar meshing patterns. The model validations, comparativeanalysis and parametric studies were carried out based on three classical PMHS experiments.After the validation work, MADYMO and LS-DYNA software were applied to reconstruct anaccident, predict injuries and conduct parametric studies. In addition, the commonly usedscaling method was validated by the simulation of the skull fracture and intracranial pressurePMHS experiments.The simulation results showed that the series children head finite element models had areal head biomechanics response. Children suffer a great risk of head injury compared toadults under the same loading condition and the risk decrease with the child’s age and skullstiffness increase. Scaling method would result in a great influence to the head response. Theaccident reconstruction result predicted the injury location and degree very well, therefore thisseries children head finite element models has a good biofidelity and can be used insubsequent children head injuries study.