RESEARCH ARTICLE
Injury Risk Assessment of Non-Lethal Projectile Head Impacts
Amar Oukara 1, 2, 3, *, Nestor Nsiampa 1, 3, Cyril Robbe , Alexandre Papy 1
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2014Volume: 8
First Page: 75
Last Page: 83
Publisher ID: TOBEJ-8-75
DOI: 10.2174/1874120701408010075
Article History:
Received Date: 22/5/2014Revision Received Date: 31/7/2014
Acceptance Date: 4/8/2014
Electronic publication date: 30 /10/2014
Collection year: 2014
open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.
Abstract
Kinetic energy non-lethal projectiles are used to impart sufficient effect onto a person in order to deter uncivil or hazardous behavior with a low probability of permanent injury. Since their first use, real cases indicate that the injuries inflicted by such projectiles may be irreversible and sometimes lead to death, especially for the head impacts. Given the high velocities and the low masses involved in such impacts, the assessment approaches proposed in automotive crash tests and sports may not be appropriate. Therefore, there is a need of a specific approach to assess the lethality of these projectiles. In this framework, some recent research data referred in this article as “force wall approach” suggest the use of three lesional thresholds (unconsciousness, meningeal damages and bone damages) that depend on the intracranial pressure. Three corresponding critical impact forces are determined for a reference projectile. Based on the principle that equal rigid wall maximal impact forces will produce equal damage on the head, these limits can be determined for any other projectile. In order to validate the consistence of this innovative method, it is necessary to compare the results with other existing assessment methods. This paper proposes a comparison between the “force wall approach” and two different head models. The first one is a numerical model (Strasbourg University Finite Element Head Model-SUFEHM) from Strasbourg University; the second one is a mechanical surrogate (Ballistics Load Sensing Headform-BLSH) from Biokinetics.
