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Design of safety helmets

Alessandro Cernicchi
Dainese-AGV group

Helmets is the device which mostly improve the safety of motorcycle and moped riders. Statistical surveys show that the use of helmets is associated with a reduction of about 40% in the risk of death or severe injuries. Yet, due to the complexity of this safety device, the design has been carried out by manufacturer empirically by trial and error methods. Not only does this lead to high development costs, but also to a final product which is possibly not optimized. In the last five years Dainese-AGV have implemented a design procedure which make use of FEM crash simulations with LS-DYNA for validating new products. This work presents briefly the main steps involved in this implementation process and the advantages in terms of cost reduction, product optimization and development time reduction. The use of FE simulations has drastically reduced the amount of experimental testing necessary for helmets validation, furthermore, thanks to the great flexibility of virtual simulations, it has been possible to develop innovative concepts and set enhanced safety standards for helmets.