Dr. Spyros Masouros’ research team at ICL’s Royal British Legion Center for Blast Injury Studies, alongside a group of military trauma surgeons, is attempting to learn how to better mitigate blast injuries using simulation software. The team hopes to determine the physics involved in blast injuries in an effort to improve the evaluation of techniques, criteria, equipment, materials and designs to limit human injury.
The simulation created is known as AnUBIS (anti-vehicle, underbelly, blast-injury simulator). It allows researchers to input the FE models of extremities and protective gear, like boots, into the model. The simulation then determines how the design would protect the foot, or other extremities, from the explosion. This allows for designs to be tested cheaper and with less dangerous physical testing.
According to Dr. Masouros, "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 … 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."
AnUBIS works by simulating the pneumatic acceleration of a plate with the speed, acceleration and time scale of a vehicle floorboard being pushed up by a mine. This will assess the environment a real leg would experience in the event of such a tragic event. The injuries are quantified using high speed video, medical imaging and sensor data.
Dr Masouros adds, “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."
Few weapons harm as indiscriminately as mines. Any technology to limit the injury to soldiers, civilians and innocent local inhabitants is certainly an improvement.
Source MSC Software