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Craniocerebral Dynamic Response and Cumulative Effect of Damage Under Repetitive Blast

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Abstract

Soldiers suffer from multiple explosions in complex battlefield environment resulting in aggravated brain injuries. At present, researches mostly focus on the damage to human body caused by single explosion. In the repetitive impact study, small animals are mainly used for related experiments to study brain nerve damage. No in-depth research has been conducted on the dynamic response and damage of human brain under repetitive explosion shock waves. Therefore, this study use the Euler–Lagrange coupling method to construct an explosion shock wave-head fluid–structure coupling model, and numerically simulated the brain dynamic response subjected to single and repetitive blast waves, obtained flow field pressure, skull stress, skull displacement, intracranial pressure to analyze the brain damage. The simulation results of 100 g equivalent of TNT exploding at 1 m in front of the craniocerebral show that repetitive blast increase skull stress, intracranial pressure, skull displacement, and the damage of brain tissue changes from moderate to severe. Repetitive blasts show a certain cumulative damage effect, the severity of damage caused by double blast is 122.5% of single shock, and the severity of damage caused by triple blast is 105.9% of double blast and 131.5% of single blast. The data above shows that it is necessary to reduce soldiers’ exposure from repetitive blast waves.

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Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the support from National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 11972158), Military Commission Science and Technology Committee Basic Strengthening Program Technology Fund (2020-JCJQ-JJ-356) and (2019-JCJQ-JJ-150), Educational Commission of Hunan Province of China (18A188).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hunan University of Science and Technology, Xiangtan, 411201, China

    Xingyuan Huang, Xiaoping Hu & Zhihua Cai

  2. Research Institute for National Defense Engineering of Academy of Military Science PLA China, Luoyang, 471023, China

    Lei Zhang

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  1. Xingyuan Huang
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  2. Xiaoping Hu
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  3. Lei Zhang
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  4. Zhihua Cai
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Correspondence to Lei Zhang or Zhihua Cai.

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Associate Editor Stefan M Duma oversaw the review of this article.

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Huang, X., Hu, X., Zhang, L. et al. Craniocerebral Dynamic Response and Cumulative Effect of Damage Under Repetitive Blast. Ann Biomed Eng 49, 2932–2943 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10439-021-02746-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10439-021-02746-7

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