Development of a Human Head FE Model and Impact Simulation on the Focal Brain Injury

In this paper, a three-dimensional digital human-head model was developed and several dynamic analyses on the head trauma were conducted. This model was built up by the VOXEL approach using 433 slice CT images (512×512 pixels) and made of 1.22 million parallelepiped finite elements with 10 anatomical tissue properties such as scalp, CSF, skull, brain, dura mater and so on. The numerical analyses were conducted using a finite element code the authors have developed. The main features of the code are 1) it is based on the explicit time integration method and 2) it uses the one point integration method to evaluate the equivalent nodal forces with the hourglass control proposed by Flanagan and Belytschko(1) and 3) it utilizes the parallel computation system based on MPI. In order to verify the developed model, the head impact experiment for a cadaver by Nahum et al.(2) was simulated. The calculated results showed good agreement with the experimental ones. A front and rear impact analyses were also performed to discuss on the characteristic measure of the brain injury, in which the von-Mises stress was high in the frontal lobe in both of the analyses because of the large deformations of a frontal cranial base. This result suggests that the von-Mises stress can be a good measure of the brain injury since it is empirically well known that the frontal lobe tends to get injured regardless of the impact positions.