A Biomechanical Model for the Investigation of Blast Traumatic Brain Injury

The objectives of this proposal are to develop an animal surrogate finite element (FE) model and environment that can be used as a tool to investigate injury mechanisms and mitigation of traumatic brain injury (TBI) due to blast overpressure. A rat head model with a high degree of anatomical detail will be refined for used within an FE blast environment. To avoid the use of unnecessarily costly and complex computational fluid dynamics techniques, Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics and Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian methods will be employed to simulate the blast. Verification of these methods using a brain simulant will occur before performing a feasibility study by applying the blast simulation to the rat head FE model. Existing in vivo pressure data from tests at Wayne State University will be used to establish an initial degree of validation. Because tissue properties during high-rate loading, such as blast, are largely unknown, principal component analysis will be conducted to determine the most sensitive tissue properties, and optimization techniques will be used to increase the correlation between experimentally measured and model-predicted pressures. This model will be used as a basis for further development of a research tool to study TBI in Phase II.