Professor Raúl A. Radovitzky

Blast protection and injury mitigation

Today, blast attacks have become a primary threat in both military and civilian contexts. Paradoxically, blast protection has seldom ever been a consideration in the design of personal or vehicle armor, which has been primarily driven by ballistic protection. As a result, there is a limited understanding of the mechanics of the interaction of blast waves with structures and humans; as well as a generalized lack of rational strategies to approach the design of material systems for blast protection.

Working as part of the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, Professor Radovitzky is involved in developing models of blast effects on humans and structures, with the aim of getting a better understanding of how to use nanoengineered materials for blast protection.

Professor Radovitzky has developed a theory which quantifies the fluid-structure interaction effect on the impulse transmitted by a blast wave to a structure in the presence of fluid compressibility, as is relevant in the case of airborne blast waves. It is found that the effect of compressibility is to exacerbate the impulse mitigation provided by fluid-structure interaction. He has also developed and implemented an algorithm in the form of a large-scale parallel code for the coupled analysis of blast-wave interactions with solid materials and tissues.

Prof Radovitzky is also involved with a team of five faculty from two universities and three leading researchers in the Army, focusing on Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) caused by blast. This project, supported by the Department of Defense Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), is motivated by the high incidence of TBI produced by roadside bombs and IEDs in current conflicts, and aims to elucidate the physical and physiological mechanisms of injury to the brain at the cell and tissue level caused by blast waves. The goal is to develop a rational metric of blast injury and associated thresholds which can then be used in combination with blast exposure sensing devices to aid in the clinical diagnostic and treatment of TBI, as well as for designing mitigation systems.

The team includes other faculty from MIT and from Purdue University; and medical staff at the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center at Walter Reed Army Medical Center; and the Hefner VA Medical Center in North Carolina.

As part of this project, the team has demonstrated that the conditions the brain is subjected to during a blast event are well in excess of the threshold values of the accepted brain injury criteria for impact conditions. This suggests that the primary effects of a blast constitute a plausible cause for TBI.  They have also developed the most comprehensive model of the full human head in existence containing all the relevant differentiated head and brain tissues and structures. This model will soon be released to the medical research community as the MIT/DVBIC full head model.

Professor Radovitzky also participates on an Office of Naval Research MURI project recently awarded to a team involving faculty from the University of Virginia, UCSB and Harvard University. This project focuses on developing blast and ballistic threat mitigation strategies exploiting cellular material concepts.