In an impact, the first couple of milliseconds are the most critical.
People have to understand the concept of injuring the brain through rotation.
If you were to watch a slow motion video of a boxing match where someone gets hit on the chin,
you’ll see that the skull and teeth instantly rotate,
while the nose, ears and soft tissues stay back and get distorted.
Unfortunately, the same happens inside the skull.
The skull quickly spins, but the brain gets distorted, which causes the injury.
There are a number of testing standards that already exist for helmets.
They're all linear drop tests.
The simulated head is dropped straight down on a flat surface.
It's rigidly mounted so that the head cannot rotate.
So we need to modify that impact tester to allow for more realistic, oblique, impact.
Then we added a neck surrogate to it, so now the head can rotate during impact.
When we first looked at this, and we thought about that, we started testing this.
Obviously, the first thing we went to was a slip liner.
At low energy, slip liners reduce the amount of rotational acceleration in the system.
But as you start to increase the energy, their efficacy starts to decrease.
What can I make to lessen that rotational spin to the head during an impact?
Michael introduced the concept of a material that was three-dimensional.
It could behave in different ways depending on which angle that the energy came into it.
It's that whole process that led to WaveCel.
WaveCel cell structure has a specific cell shape that allows it to deform into a sphere without distorting the cells.
It’s suspended inside a helmet as a continuous liner.
It behaves differently depending on the angle that it's hit at, which is very unique to the material.
Each cell has a small fold in it that helps initiate the crumpling in a straight impact.
But most importantly, it allows the cells to fold over and shear.
It allows the helmet to spin on itself rather than imparting that spin to the head to cause the concussion.
If you take the standard force and a threshold at a given angle of impact,
you can calculate what your risk of concussion would be.
The beautiful thing about the research is that it's really open source and collaboration-based.
We conduct the impact tests, we measure the forces, and we sent the data to France.
They can simulate what would happen to the brain.
We look at other aspects that could be of concern, such as skin abrasion.
The consistent feedback we get is how comfortable it feels.
Your regular EPS helmet is a hard, rigid shell, so you have pressure points.
WaveCel is a flexible dome inside your helmet that naturally conforms to different head shapes.
Because it's pretty much all air, it's an extremely breathable material.
From a convection standpoint, it lets out a lot of heat and air can flow through it.
Having production based locally here in Portland allows us to do a lot of on-site testing
for impact, for stretching, optical for coloration.
We want to look at different impact angles and different impact speeds.
Then we go into a cold conditions, hot conditions, aging, UV impact…
So it's a fairly intense process.
We can ensure here on-site that the WaveCel leaving our facility meets all of our requirements in a consistent manner.
Developing a better helmet that decreases concussion
gave Michael and I the opportunity to explore that realm of prevention.
It's a very straightforward strategy, as a research endeavor, to develop the best helmet we possibly can.
We will produce more papers in the future where we look at all the new technologies; how they work.
Hopefully it will just inspire change and advances.
I think there will be great opportunities going forward.
Based on reduction in rotational acceleration at impact. Probability of injury in an actual accident depends on numerous factors, including nature of impact and individual health. Read study at www.trekbikes.com/what-is-wavecel.