Model of head struck by softball (Washington State University)
Engineers at Washington State University in Pullman built a system that lets sports scientists measure the impact of a softball hitting a player’s head to simulate potential injuries based on the properties of the ball. Washington State engineering professor Lloyd Smith and project engineer Derek Nevins will report their findings next week at the Asia-Pacific Congress on Sports Technology in Hong Kong, which also appeared recently in the journal Procedia Engineering.
Softball is one of the safer sports, but it still gets its share of injuries. Smith and Nevins cite statistics showing players getting hit by batted or thrown balls caused nearly a quarter (23.5%) of the injuries in collegiate fast-pitch softball over 12 seasons. Batted balls hitting players’ heads caused from 3 to 9 percent of the injuries to pitchers, base runners, or third base players.
While properties of human body parts are often modeled to test potential injuries, say the authors, properties of batted or thrown balls have not been studied as much. Authorities for various sports, including softball, set standards for their equipment, which include the ball’s size, weight, stiffness of the exterior, and coefficient of restitution, a measure of the energy transferred when the ball makes contact with an object. A softball is designed to absorb and dissipate energy, but because of variations in their properties, softballs can behave differently when they hit a player in the head.
To find out more about the potential damage a softball can inflict when it hits a human skull, Smith and Nevins adapted an automated visual model designed by Toyota called Total Human Model for Safety that offers detailed bone structures in the skull, facial muscles, and cerebrospinal fluid. The researchers tested the impact of two softballs from different manufacturers, both considered standard equipment, on the front and side of a simulated player’s head when thrown at various velocities.
Even though the two softballs are used at the same level of amateur softball play, Smith and Nevins found the two types of balls differed in stiffness by 30 percent, which resulted in wide variations in injury potential. The simulations show that the the two types of softballs can differ in bone stress on an average size adult by as much as 64 percent. In high-speed/worst-case scenarios, considered rare in the sport, bone stress exceeded bone strength — or the impact caused a skull fracture.
The authors say the model can help design equipment used in the sport that maintains the quality of play while protecting the players. The model can also be extended to better understand other collision injuries, such as concussions.
In the following brief video, Smith describes and demonstrates the model.
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