Computational modeling of primary blast effects on the human brain

Since the beginning of the military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, there have been over 250,000 diagnoses of traumatic brain injury (TBI) in the U.S. military, with the majority of incidents caused by improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Despite the urgent need to understand blast-induced TBI in order to devise strategies for protection and treatment, much remains unknown about the mechanism of injury, the effects of personal protective equipment (PPE) such as helmets, and injury metrics and thresholds. In order to help address these gaps, this thesis has four objectives: 1) to present a comprehensive computational framework for investigating the mechanical response of the human head to blasts that includes blast-structure interaction codes, a detailed, three-dimensional model of a human head generated from high-resolution medical imaging data, and an experimentally-validated constitutive model for brain tissue; 2) to validate the framework against a broad range of experiments, including free-field blast tests involving physical human head surrogates and laboratory-scale shock tube tests involving animals and human cadavers; 3) to use the computational framework to investigate the effect of PPE on the propagation of stress waves within the brain following blast events and evaluate their blast protection performance; and 4) to develop interspecies scaling laws for the blast response of the brain that would allow translation of injury metrics from animals to humans.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2013

Author dc:creator

• Nyein, Michelle K. (Michelle Kyaw)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Raúl Radovitzky.

• Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/82474

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/82474