This research found that football players were unknowingly causing permanent brain damage as they screamed at their heads during their active careers, prompting the need to develop better head protection. One such invention is nanofoam a breakthrough in material design, the material on the inside of football helmets.
Thanks to Professor Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering BAOXING XU of the University of Virginia and his research team, nanofoam received a big boost, and protective sports equipment can also get one. This newly invented design integrates nanofoam with a “non-wetting ionized liquid”, the type of water that Xu and his research team know now mixes perfectly with nanofoam to make a liquid ceiling. This flexible and responsive material will provide excellent protection for athletes and shows promise for protecting motorists and helping hospital patients with wearable medical devices.
A similar study was recently published in ADVANCED MATERIALS.
For maximum protection, the protective foam inserted between the inside and outside of the helmet should not only have one hit, but many hits, game after game. The material should be soft enough to create a soft spot for the head to fall, but hard enough to bounce back and be ready for another hit. And that thing should be strong but not strong, because “strong” also hurts your head. Having a common use for all these things is a difficult task.
The group promoted their work previously published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which began to explore the use of liquid and nanofoam, to create materials that meet the complex safety requirements of contact sports.
“We found that creating liquid nanofoam in ionized water instead of regular water made things work differently,” Xu said. “Using ionized water in design is a milestone as we discovered a unique water ion processing network that allowed for more sophisticated designs.”
Liquid nanofoam filling allows the inside of the helmet to compress the mouth and dissipate the impact force, reducing the force transmitted to the head and reducing the risk of injury. It also returns to its original shape after impact, allowing for more hits and ensuring that the helmet continues to protect the athlete’s head during the game.
“An added benefit,” Xu continued, “is that these improved materials are flexible and more comfortable to wear. The material reacts strongly to external jolts because of how the ion clusters and arrays are formed in the material.
“The water barrier can be designed to be simple, small and safe,” said Professor WEIYI LU, an associate professor of civil engineering at Michigan State University. “Furthermore, the reduction in weight and size of liquid nanofoam liners will change the hard-shell design of future helmets. You can watch a football game one day and wonder how small helmets protect players’ heads. Maybe it’s because of our new hardware.
In traditional nanofoam, the protection mechanism is based on the characteristics of the material that reacts when it is crushed or deformed, such as “collapse” and “densification”. Collapse is what it sounds like, and densification is the hard deformation of the foam and the impact of weight.
After failure and densification, the culture of nanofoam does not recover well due to the permanent deformation of the material, which makes the protection unique.
Compared to liquid nanofoam, these materials are relatively slow (a few milliseconds) and cannot meet the “high energy reduction requirements”, which means that they cannot effectively absorb and dissipate energy. falling high in a short time window related to collisions and impacts.
Another disadvantage of traditional nanofoam is that when it is subjected to many small impacts that do not modify the material, the foam becomes completely “hard” and behaves like a solid body that cannot provide protection. Hardness can lead to injuries and soft tissue damage, such as traumatic brain injury (TBI).
By manipulating the material – combining the nanoporous material with “non-wetting water” or ionized water – the team developed a way to create a material that can respond to impact in microseconds because this combination and -allows rapid and nanoconfined liquid transport Environment.
In addition, when it is unloaded, that is, after its impact, due to its non-wetted nature, the liquid nanofoam pad can return to its original shape as the water comes out of the pores, thus repeated crop resistance. This design and dynamic flexibility also solves the problem of hard materials due to low impact.
The same water properties that make this new nanofoam a protective material for sports equipment also allow it to be used in other areas that interact, such as cars, in which protection and protective systems are being considered to accommodate the emerging era of electric and automated vehicles. It can be used to create pads that absorb shock during an accident or help reduce vibration and noise.
Another purpose that may not be obvious is the role that liquid nanofoam can play in the hospital. The foam can be used in wearable medical devices like smartwatches, which monitor your heart rate and other vital signs. By incorporating liquid nanofoam technology, the watch can have a soft, flexible foam-like material underneath and help improve the sensor’s accuracy by ensuring it’s comfortable against your skin.
It can fit your wrist shape, making it comfortable to wear all day. In addition, the foam can provide additional protection by acting as a shock absorber. If you accidentally hit your hand on a hard surface, the foam can help cushion the impact and prevent any damage to your sensors or skin.
Source: UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND APPLIED SCIENCE
