A Human Body Model for Computational Assessment of Blast Injury and Protection

In this proposal, a team comprising of HyPerComp and Aerojet-Rocketdyne shall create a computational system for the detailed modeling of the interaction of the human body with blast waves. The model will be able to address complex geometry and physics of the blast scene, as well as anatomical detail of the human body with adequate resolution. Nonlinear equations of state, adapted to individual tissues in the body shall be used in modeling the propagation of waves. Numerical techniques proposed here have been tested extensively in aerodynamics and propulsion applications in modeling multiphase and multi-material physics. The simulation suite shall comprise of human body models (with CAD/voxel import), graphical and interactive systems for simulation setup, automatic mesh generation, high performance computing and post-processing utilities. As this work progresses, additional capabilities to articulate the human body model and perform detailed (biologically relevant) flow-structure interaction shall be included in the system. Some innovations in performing broad parametric studies based on recent advances in reduced basis methods are proposed. It is believed that these methods can relieve some of the tedium involved in large scale computations involving multiple phenomena and physical inputs.