The military helmet innovators taking on battlefield head injury

Researchers in San Antonio, Texas, are set to embark on a ground-breaking project aimed at enhancing the padding in military helmets to protect against impacts of varying speeds. Rebecca Bird reports. 

Dr Daniel Portillo of Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has teamed up with Dr Morteza Seidi at The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) for the year-long study.

Together with their team, the pair will explore innovative materials and designs that could cushion soldiers from both blunt and ballistic impacts on the battlefield for the first time.

They plan to harness their collective expertise and use a combination of computational models and experimental testing in the upcoming research and development.

A gap in helmet design

Current military helmets are designed to protect the wearer’s head against specific threats – either low-speed blunt impact or high-speed ballistic impact.

But they often lack the versatility to safeguard the brain across the wide range of forces experienced in military settings.

Dr Portillo told NR Times that the team’s aim is to develop a pad that remains soft and compressible during slower impacts like the force of falls or collisions.

It then needs to become firmer during high-speed impacts that can reach hundreds of metres per second, such as those from bullets or projectiles.

The experts have “a novel idea” in designing a pad that can perform differently for those different events.

The technology would behave similarly to oobleck, a corn-starch and water mixture that moves differently depending on the external force applied to it, Dr Portillo explained.

Versatile impact protection

The study will begin this October with the team building computer simulations to predict how different materials and designs respond to varying speeds.

“Then, once we have a good variety of combinations and different pad designs, we’ll actually experimentally test them,” Dr Portillo said.

This will confirm performance and that the simulations were accurate.

The researchers will eventually take the top two or three performers and carry out full helmet testing.

“We will use a universal gun system to shoot different bullets at helmets containing our new pads,” Dr Portillo explained.

“Those helmets will be placed on head replicas that have acceleration sensors inside of them to measure forces.”

Blast protection

The focus of the research will be on blunt and ballistic protection, however, the research team will also consider how effectively the helmet pads could shield against blast impacts.

Blasts from explosive devices are a major cause of traumatic brain injuries in combat zones, often resulting from the pressure waves generated during an explosion.

Traditional helmet designs often do not adequately absorb or dissipate the energy from blasts, which can lead to concussive forces that affect brain function.

While the researchers do not intend to conduct blast tests in the project’s initial, they may carry out experiments later.

This could involve the use of a shock tube, which employs compressed gas to simulate a blast wave, or they may choose to detonate explosives.

Collaboration

The collaboration with UTSA, the largest university in San Antonio where Dr Portillo spent nearly a decade studying, is a key factor in the research.

Dr Seidi’s background in designing football helmet padding combined with SwRI’s expertise in engineering design as well as ballistic and blast testing makes for a strong partnership.

Dr Portillo said the relationship is “really, really important” and the wide range of expertise and experience benefits both sides.

The year-long research is supported by a US$125,000 internal research grant from the Connecting through Research Partnerships (Connect) programme.

Once the study is complete, the next stage will be finding other sources of collaborations to take the technology forward, Dr Portillo explained.

Though the primary focus of the research is military applications, the helmet padding may eventually offer benefits to other fields, including law enforcement and security services.