MSC Software Corporation announced that Imperial College London relied on MSC Software's Marc Nonlinear Finite Element Analysis (FEA) solution to develop a unique traumatic injury simulator.
Engineers from The Royal British Legion Centre for Blast Injury Studies at Imperial College London, in collaboration with military trauma surgeons, are developing and utilizing traumatic injury simulation in an attempt to improve blast mitigation. In order to understand the physical mechanisms involved and to develop new and improved evaluation criteria, techniques, materials and design in a cost efficient manner, it is necessary for Dr. Spyros Masouros' research team to work with both experimental and computational models of human injury and mitigation technologies.
To investigate the mechanism of extremity injury caused by explosions and develop appropriate mitigation strategies, the researchers at Imperial College London designed a unique traumatic injury simulator (AnUBIS, anti-vehicle, underbelly, blast-injury simulator). Using Marc Nonlinear Finite Element (FE) Analysis from MSC Software, the researchers were able to optimize the design, map the full capability of the device without having to conduct lengthy and expensive experiments, and, importantly, are now able to combine the FE model of AnUBIS with FE models of the combat boot and the lower extremity in order to explore mitigation strategies numerically, before putting the best ones to the test.
The simulator (AnUBIS) is a pneumatically driven device, able to accelerate a heavy plate up to velocities and within timeframes seen in the floor of vehicles when targeted by a mine. It is, therefore, capable of simulating the loading environment that a vehicle occupant's leg will face. By combining multiple-sensor data, high speed video and medical imaging, the conditions causing the injuries sustained by the lower limb can be quantified.
"The key to understanding the mechanisms of injury is the ability to deconstruct the complexities of an explosive event into a controlled, laboratory-based environment," said Dr. Masouros. "With AnUBIS, we can quantify the mechanism. Moreover, the strong convergence behavior of MSC's Marc, in the presence of soft materials undergoing substantial distortional loading, was a great help in developing our numerical models quickly. We were very impressed with the global remeshing capability of Marc in robustly handling the complexities of our simulations," Dr Masouros continued, "The technical support we received from MSC Software UK was invaluable as we developed proprietary numerical schemes via user subroutines and the Python API to further automate our analyses, whilst the ongoing product development in Marc's user interface has proved to be a further boost to our productivity."
