NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF HUMAN HEAD IMPACT USING THE MATERIAL POINT METHOD

In this paper, a three-dimensional material point human head model is constructed from the computed tomography (CT) scanned images of an adult male volunteer, and used to study the dynamic response of human head under the impact of a three-dimensional cylindrical lead projectile with a speed of 6.4m/s. The model consists of skull bone, brain tissue and membrane of human head, which is close to the real one. The skull and membrane are modeled by an elastic constitutive model, and the brain tissue is modeled by an anisotropic viscoelastic constitutive model. These constitutive models have been implemented in our three-dimensional explicit material point method code, MPM3D, and is verified by comparing its numerical results for a ball impact problem with those obtained by LS-DYNA. The simulation results help illustrate the response of skull bone, membrane and brain tissues subjected to impact, which contributes to the understanding of the biomechanics and mechanisms of head injury.