A Multi-Purpose Novel Biofidelic Head Surrogate to Evaluate Head Protection Systems from Ballistic, Blast, Sound, and Blunt Exposures

The goal of this project is to design, fabricate, and demonstrate an easily reproducible and biofidelic head and neck surrogate to evaluate head protection systems from ballistic, blast, sound, and blunt exposures/threats.The CFDRC/APL team has extensive experience developing surrogate solutions to measure these types of threats and proposes creating a multi-purpose design which can be adapted to measure each threat of interest.In Phase I, a comprehensive requirements investigation will lead to a solution space where a trade-off analysis of the initial designs features can be made.Based on this analysis, a preliminary head/neck surrogate design will be developed leveraging our teams past work.Emphasis in the Phase I effort will be put on delivering a complete virtual preliminary design and during the Option period, conducting small scale prototype materials testing.Phase II will expand the materials development/production resulting in a full scale head/neck prototype to be delivered during the program.The finalized design will be computationally investigated to assist in creating test protocols for all current and future head protection systems.Incorporating COTS sensor solutions and easily reproducible materials for the head/neck surrogate, the overall cost of the head/neck surrogate can be kept low to allow repeated testing.