CAMCS
Biological Impact
This thrust investigates the consequences of impacts in biological environments, with particular reference to impacts on the human body. Impact on the human body occurs under a variety of situations, e.g. as a result of falls, violent crime, automobile crashes and war. All result in injury, and estimation of that injury is a critical part of the emergency and clinical response. Impact problems in general have several unique features: high stresses as a result of inertial confinement, shock propagation and shock damage, the triggering of vibrational modes, and accelerations that may be injurious in themselves. This program seeks to delineate some of the key issues in the dynamics of human soft tissues.
Our current effort is focused on developing a fundamental mechanistic understanding of impact-related traumatic brain injury (TBI). Diffuse axonal injury (DAI) accounts for the second largest percentage of deaths due to head trauma; it is caused by inertial loads to the head and is characterized by damage to neural axons. Although numerous brain tissue models have been proposed, few models account for the anisotropic nature of white matter in the brain; the stiffness of regions with different neural tract alignments can differ up to 30% (Prange et al. 2002). We are taking the first steps towards developing a micromechanically consistent multiscale anisotropic model for white matter.