EPITOME RESEARCH AND INNOVATIONS INC. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: DHA211-003

Description

Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) personnel involved with the clearance of underwater mines, divers working with explosives and other impulsive noise sources such as underwater explosion (UNDEX) tools are exposed to risk of injury or loss of life. The increased density and viscosity along with the decreased compressibility of water relative to air, mean that underwater blast waves propagate further and injure a target more readily than waves generated in air. Gas-filled organs such as the lungs are very susceptible to injury due to a UNDEX. In fact, studies have indicated that the implosion and over-tension effects of shock waves lead to alveolar rupture, lung tissue hemorrhage, pulmonary interstitial damage, lung edema, pleural effusion, and pulmonary opacification which are life-threatening conditions. Therefore, the development of effective EOD personnel protection and countermeasures requires a deep understanding of the issues concerning hydrodynamics, biomechanical, and biological/physiological effects of underwater explosions. The computational tools reported in literature so far have focused only a narrow set of physics and/or parameters. While some focus on just the hydrodynamics aspects of underwater explosions and some only on biomechanical/physiological aspects. There are some that focused on coupled fluid-structure interaction but, only surrogate problems like an air-filled spherical membrane, not an anatomically realistic lung structure, were studied. To address this need, Epitome Research and Innovations Inc. proposes a SBIR project to develop a versatile, self-contained, open-source, and an extensible computational multiphysics framework that can simulate an UNDEX while accounting for issues concerning explosions, fluid interactions, fluid-solid interactions, hydrostatic loading, and shock wave propagation. The resultant multiphysics framework can account for a variety of UNDEX scenarios including explosives with different charge weight, explosive type, and location of explosive relative to the target (e.g., lungs) in water, model anatomically-correct whole-body human/animal model targets placed at arbitrary spatial locations in the computational space, model interactions (e.g., mechanical contact) between all structures (e.g., interactions between lungs and the rib cage, diaphragm and the lungs), and is extensible and also modular enough to couple with other tools/frameworks seamlessly.