Low-Velocity Impacts on a Polymeric Foam for the Passive Safety Improvement of Sports Fields: Meshless Approach and Experimental Validation

Abstract

Over the past few years, foam materials have been increasingly used in the passive safety of sport fields, to mitigate the risk of crash injury. Currently, the passive safety certification process of these materials represents an expensive and time-consuming task, since a considerable number of impact tests on material samples have to be carried out by an ad hoc testing apparatus. To overcome this difficulty and speed up the design process of new protective devices, a virtual model for the low-velocity impact behaviour of foam protective mats is needed. In this study a modelling approach based on the mesh-free Element Galerkin method was developed to investigate the impact behaviour of ethylene-vinyl acetate (EVA) foam protective mats. The main advantage of this novel technique is that the difficulties related to the computational mesh distortion and caused by the large deformation of the foam material are avoided and a good accuracy is achieved at a relatively low computational cost. The numerical model was validated statistically by comparing numerical and experimental acceleration data acquired during a series of impact events on EVA foam mats of various thicknesses. The findings of this study are useful for the design and improvement of foam protective devices and allow for optimizing sports fields’ facilities by reducing head injury risk by a reliable computational method.

Potential of Soft-Shelled Rugby Headgear to Reduce Linear Impact Accelerations

“…Increased attention on the negative effects of sports concussions and recent advances in technology have resulted in a number of innovative theoretical approaches being developed in order to analyse impacts in a sports context [22,23]. Approaches have to include laboratory simulations, human tests, and tests with animals [22][23][24][25]. Whyte et al (2019) provided a comprehensive review of impact testing for sports headgear and highlighted the need for experimental validation in all theoretical approaches [23].…”

The Out-Of-Plane Compression Behavior of In Situ Ethylene Vinyl Acetate (EVA)-Foam-Filled Aluminum Honeycomb Sandwich Structures

“…Moreover, EVA has a relatively low cost when evaluated for a similar polymer group such as thermoplastic polyurethane [27]. Foams made from EVA exhibit high impact resistance, vibration absorption capacity, and great recoverability characteristics after compression due to their viscoelastic nature [28][29][30]. Chang et al [31] demonstrated that the impact absorption is better by EVA foam when compared with the same density EPP foam when used as cushioning materials for bulletproof plates.…”

Sports Materials Special Issue Editorial

“…Three articles in the issue cover materials for safety devices. The first of these articles was authored by Penta and coworkers [12], and showcases a meshless approach for modelling the impact response of polymeric foam crash mats, with implications for the design of foam protective devices. The meshless approach allowed the crash mat model to function under high strain deformation, where elements within a mesh are prone to distortion.…”