NUMERICAL ANALYSIS OF A PROJECTILE PENETRATION INTO THE HUMAN HEAD VIA MESHLESS METHOD

In recent years, physicists, engineers and medical scientists have tried to demonstrate the biomechanics of gunshot wounds with numerical methods and experimental observations. Currently, the finite element method (FEM) is the most widely used numerical method among the studies related to ballistic wound injuries. However, when the FEM is used for the penetration analysis, the path of the projectile in the skull is subjected to extremely large deformations which will introduce errors due to distortion of elements. To overcome this error, the meshfree technique was established to simulate the gunshot wound as a preliminary study in which the skull was modeled by smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) and the projectile was modeled by nondeformable rigid elements. In order to simulate a realistic penetration phenomenon, orthotropic material properties were defined for different regions (forehead, zygomatic and mandible) with material principal axis along the surface of the bones. Human response to the ballistics impacts were determined in terms of force occurring along the pathway of the bullet in the skull, residual velocity of the projectile and penetration depth. The obtained results were compared with the data reported in literature. As a result, mechanical behavior of the head under ballistic impacts simulated by the SPH, compared well with the results determined by the data given in literature, which indicates the applicability of the SPH method as a powerful technique in simulating different gunshot wound mechanisms.