think the hardest part from a engineering standpoint, is having a player encounter force enough to not fully utilize the crumple zone, but weaken it. The player wouldn’t realize that his crumple zone has been structurally weakened, and the next play in which the player gets hit hard enough to fully utilize the crumple zone, the zones “crumple” doesn’t work as well, which leaves the player worse off from a protection standpoint.
Yes, you would certainly want a fairly robust material that would weaken at a predictable rate. After thinking about it more, I’m now considering a re-usable system, made of some sort of rigid plastic, where there’s a gap between the head and helmet maintained by interlocking teeth. Under a heavy load, the plastic would deform, collapsing the space. Then you could just pop it back out after. Much like a medicine bottle’s child safety, the teeth would provide the bulk of their resistance in only one direction.
It’s not too different from re-usable breaking boards that martial arts schools sometimes use. Just much smaller, and repeated in a sort of matrix formation.
It’s definitely feasible, we possess the technology to make this happen. Might be expensive, I don’t know. Might also be inferior to this design:
Something is worth it to reduce concussion rates, I do hope the NFL eventually takes this more seriously, though I know they don’t actually give a shit about the players. Current helmets are an absolute joke, though, it should be embarrassing in these modern days. Kinetic energy can be absorbed/converted/dissipated in many different ways.
Yeah I could see how that would work, interesting design idea! they’d probably be pretty easy to mass produce too, so having a player pop in a new insert wouldn’t be so laborious as to hinder the game.
But those liquid shock absorbers, now that’s wild, seems like some Stanford peeps beat us to the punch 😅
think the hardest part from a engineering standpoint, is having a player encounter force enough to not fully utilize the crumple zone, but weaken it. The player wouldn’t realize that his crumple zone has been structurally weakened, and the next play in which the player gets hit hard enough to fully utilize the crumple zone, the zones “crumple” doesn’t work as well, which leaves the player worse off from a protection standpoint.
Yes, you would certainly want a fairly robust material that would weaken at a predictable rate. After thinking about it more, I’m now considering a re-usable system, made of some sort of rigid plastic, where there’s a gap between the head and helmet maintained by interlocking teeth. Under a heavy load, the plastic would deform, collapsing the space. Then you could just pop it back out after. Much like a medicine bottle’s child safety, the teeth would provide the bulk of their resistance in only one direction.
It’s not too different from re-usable breaking boards that martial arts schools sometimes use. Just much smaller, and repeated in a sort of matrix formation.
It’s definitely feasible, we possess the technology to make this happen. Might be expensive, I don’t know. Might also be inferior to this design:
https://scitechdaily.com/new-stanford-developed-high-tech-helmets-could-protect-football-players-from-debilitating-concussions/?expand_article=1
Something is worth it to reduce concussion rates, I do hope the NFL eventually takes this more seriously, though I know they don’t actually give a shit about the players. Current helmets are an absolute joke, though, it should be embarrassing in these modern days. Kinetic energy can be absorbed/converted/dissipated in many different ways.
Yeah I could see how that would work, interesting design idea! they’d probably be pretty easy to mass produce too, so having a player pop in a new insert wouldn’t be so laborious as to hinder the game.
But those liquid shock absorbers, now that’s wild, seems like some Stanford peeps beat us to the punch 😅