SAFE Laboratories: Safety Analysis & Forensic Engineering

Severe head injuries can occur in a number of recreational activities such as motorcycling, bicycling, football, rodeo, or skate boarding where a helmet is necessary or desired.
SAFE Laboratories has the capability of performing many of the national and international helmet testing requirements:

Helmet Case Study 1:
A man was thrown from his motorcycle and received a skull fracture from his helmet with an integral interior headphones. To understand the injury mechanism, several helmets were measured and marked where the impact point occurred and mounted onto a medium DOT headform and attached to an 8’ monorail drop tower fixture. Pressure sensitive film (Fujifilm) was placed to between the helmet and the headform to document any force concentrations near the headphone locations. It was then dropped onto either a hemispherical or flat FMVSS 218 compliant anvils. After conducting the tests, pressure distributions forces were shown to exceed referenced temporopariental skull fracture studies of almost 5 to 1.

Helmet Case Study 2:
While operating a Segway scooter, a man was thrown suddenly to the ground after catching a wheel on a wall. The results were a permanent catastrophic head injury. In order to quantify the effect wearing a helmet may have had in attenuating the extent of the injury, testing was conducted. The test apparatus was required to accelerate an instrumented ATD (crash dummy) to a speed comparable to that of the Segway at the time of the accident, and subsequently to trip and release the ATD to fall freely to the ground. Head injury criterion (HIC), as well as angular acceleration and linear acceleration data was collected from the ATD in order to determine the severity of any head impact. A comparison study was conducted in which several tests were run with and without a helmet in order to assess the effects of helmet use in this type of accident.