Since infant skull fractures are common in both accidental and abusive head trauma, but identifying the cause of injury may be challenging without adequate evidence, in order to better understand the mechanics of infant skull fracture and identify environmental variables that lead to certain skull fracture patterns, the current study developed an innovative computational framework that uses linear elastic fracture mechanics theory to predict skull fracture as a first step to study this problem.
The finite element method and adaptive-remeshing technique were employed to simulate high-fidelity, geometrically explicit crack propagation in an infant skull following impact. In the framework, three modes of stress intensity factors are calculated by means of the M-integral using the commercial analysis code, FRANC3D, and are used as measures of crack driving force. The anisotropy of infant skulls is represented by means of a transversely isotropic constitutive model and a direction-dependent fracture-toughness locus. The ability of the framework to predict impact-induced fracture patterns is validated by comparison with experimentally observed fracture patterns from the literature. 47 references (publisher abstract modified)
Downloads
Similar Publications
- Two-Stage Approach for the Inference of the Source of High-Dimension and Complex Chemical Data in Forensic Science
- Life and death: A systematic comparison of antemortem and postmortem gene expression
- Coping Patterns over Time and the Association with Stress, Depression and Self-Efficacy Among Adolescents: Latent Transition Analysis