Low-Velocity Impacts on a Polymeric Foam for the Passive Safety Improvement of Sports Fields: Meshless Approach and Experimental Validation

Abstract

Over the past few years, foam materials have been increasingly used in the passive safety of sport fields, to mitigate the risk of crash injury. Currently, the passive safety certification process of these materials represents an expensive and time-consuming task, since a considerable number of impact tests on material samples have to be carried out by an ad hoc testing apparatus. To overcome this difficulty and speed up the design process of new protective devices, a virtual model for the low-velocity impact behaviour of foam protective mats is needed. In this study a modelling approach based on the mesh-free Element Galerkin method was developed to investigate the impact behaviour of ethylene-vinyl acetate (EVA) foam protective mats. The main advantage of this novel technique is that the difficulties related to the computational mesh distortion and caused by the large deformation of the foam material are avoided and a good accuracy is achieved at a relatively low computational cost. The numerical model was validated statistically by comparing numerical and experimental acceleration data acquired during a series of impact events on EVA foam mats of various thicknesses. The findings of this study are useful for the design and improvement of foam protective devices and allow for optimizing sports fields’ facilities by reducing head injury risk by a reliable computational method.