Multiscale Model of Lung Injury and Personnel Protection from Blast Overpressures in Confined Areas

A high fidelity multiscale computational biophysics toolset will be developed to simulate the blast wave propagation throughout a fully defined model of the human thorax and lung alveoli. Medical imagery data, such as MRI and CT, will be used to create a 3D geometry and computational mesh model of the thorax. A Hierarchical Adaptive Mesh Refinement (HAMR) approach, developed to model the blast wave propagation within urban environments, will be modified to account for the thorax/lung tissue material properties and wave propagation physics. The displacement and shear work performed by the wave on alveolar and vascular capillary bed will be used to derive a first-principles based lung injury model, which will be correlated with experimental data. The model will be validated against experimental animal data of blast wave injury. Several new concepts of chest protective composites will be investigated and optimized. The effectiveness of protective measures will be evaluated within the fully defined thorax/confined space model framework. Phase II will; extend the model to other organs via dynamic structural mechanics models, investigate physiologically based sub-models, including multi-scale models of vasculature and pulmonary structure, validate the models to a series of experiments, and develop a virtual prototyping framework of blast injury protection armor.