Evaluation of Blast Simulation Methods for Modeling Blast Wave Interaction With Human Head

Blast-induced traumatic brain injury (bTBI) research is crucial in asymmetric warfare. The finite element analysis is an attractive option to simulate the blast wave interaction with the head. The popular blast simulation methods are ConWep-based pure Lagrangian, Arbitrary-Lagrangian-Eulerian, and coupling method. This study examines the accuracy and efficiency of ConWep and coupling methods in predicting the biomechanical response of the head. The simplified cylindrical, spherical surrogates and biofidelic human head models are subjected to field-relevant blast loads using these methods. The reflected overpressures at the surface and pressures inside the brain from the head models are qualitatively and quantitatively evaluated against the available experiments. Both methods capture the overall trends of experiments. Our results suggest that the accuracy of the ConWep method is mainly governed by the radius of curvature of the surrogate head. For the relatively smaller radius of curvature, such as cylindrical or spherical head surrogate, ConWep does not accurately capture decay of reflected blast overpressures and brain pressures. For the larger radius of curvature, such as the biofidelic human head, the predictions from ConWep match reasonably well with the experiment. For all the head surrogates considered, the reflected overpressure-time histories predicted by the coupling method match reasonably well with the experiment. Coupling method uniquely captures the shadowing and union of shock waves governed by the geometry-driven flow dynamics around the head. Overall, these findings will assist the bTBI modeling community to judiciously select an objective-driven modeling methodology.