A PORCINE FORELEG FINITE ELEMENT MODEL FOR SURFACE WAVE CHARACTERIZATION

Abstract

Injuries from BB shots are responsible for thousands of injuries each year, with many resulting in contusions or superficial embedments to the extremities. To help better understand the injury biomechanics of BB shots, a porcine foreleg finite element model was selected for comparison with some documented porcine ballistic experiments. The model was created by segmenting a porcine leg computerized tomography (CT) scan into the major bones, skin, and soft tissues, and then generating a mesh from the resulting geometries. A previously published hyperelastic material model was incorporated to represent the skin’s non-linear mechanical behavior. The pig leg model was used to simulate the skin response to 87.1 and 114.6 m/s stainless steel BB shots. The simulation matched the non-penetrative behavior from the experiments, predicting peak dynamic deformations of 12.6 and 25.4 mm respectively. MatLab was used to collect the movement of surface nodes and reconstruct continuous surfaces every 0.5 ms. The position and speed of the impact-induced wave was non-linear and did not depend on the BB initial velocity. Future work is needed to compare the simulation results against experimental digital image correlation (DIC) data, increase the time and spatial resolution of simulated sampling surface, and eventually include dynamic material data to account for skin damage with increasing BB initial velocity.