Chapter 7: Wave Transmission through Soft Tissue Matter

MARCELO F. VALDEZ; BALAKUMAR BALACHANDRAN

Simulation-Based Innovation and Discovery: Energetics Applications

CALCE EPSC Press

Lugar: College Park, Maryland; Año: 2011; p. 129 - 157

In this chapter, a review of different models and approaches that have been undertaken to study blast wave interactions with soft tissue matter is provided. It is the intention of the authors to describe the highlycomplex phenomena under study, point out the main challenges and gaps, and outline future directions in this particular research area. A nonlinear visco-elastic model is presented in the main body of this chapter, and this model is incorporated into a system for studying the interaction between blast waves and rigid structures supported by a visco-elastic material. This visco-elastic model is used to characterize brain tissue behavior based on experimental data. Subsequently, a reduced-order model of a brain fiber is constructed to study wave propagation along brain fibers. This chapter is organized as follows. Section 7.1 contains a discussion of the different factors associated with the phenomena under study. In Section 7.2, brain injury mechanism concepts are introduced. In Section 7.3, a partial review of the studies carried out on trauma brain injury are presented, both for direct impact and blast related insults. Section 7.4 includes a simplified nonlinear visco-elastic model to simulate soft tissue behavior. In Section 7.5, the authors present a model that accounts for fluid-structure interaction between air waves and a rigid structure supported by a visco-elastic material. In Section 7.6, the use of the nonlinear visco-elastic model to characterize brain tissue behavior is described. A reduced-order model for studying wave propagation along brain fibers is presented in the next section. Concluding remarks are collected and presented in Section 7.8.