Biomechanics of head protection in ice hockey - development of hockey helmet computer - aided design tool

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Each year, 32 000 Canadians suffer severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) in sports. In order to protect these athletes, CCM is dedicated to developing high-performance hockey helmets that may help reduce linear and rotational accelerations from a large variety of impacts and allow recreational and professional players to perform more safely their favorite sport. To develop such helmets, they currently use empirical methods that rely on the designers' expertise and experimental testing on prototypes. This approach is expensive, time consuming and suboptimal as the number of improvement iterations greatly influences budget and time to market. This approach is, however, the only one currently available due to a lack of knowledge on foam and helmet behavior under the complex impact loadings that may occur during a hockey game. Thus, the main goal of this project is to develop tools and methods to support the development of high-performance hockey helmets that help recreational and professional hockey players perform more safely their preferred sport and fully develop their skills. To achieve this main objective, the proposed methodological approach includes: 1) characterization of foam and helmet behavior under complex loadings using advanced experimental tools, 2) development of finite element models of foam and helmets allowing to investigate the relationship between foam characteristics and helmet behavior, and 3) support of the design of the next generation of hockey helmets. The expected results of this project are, in the short term, to improve the understanding of foam behavior in helmets and, in the long term, to substantially improve CCM helmet performance and reduce development time and cost.