Engineering in the World of Sports!

Do you play sports? Vijay Gupta, a UCLA engineering professor, has been researching ways to make football helmets safer to prevent concussions. Gupta is testing an additional layer of flexible polymer* that lessens the force of helmet-to-helmet hits and to protect the human head and brain. Adding 5 millimeters of polymer to one’s helmet can reduce force by up to 25%. Aside from football, adding this extra layer to runners’ sock lining could preserve knee cartilage for an additional ten to fifteen years. Gupta uses lasers and a hammering machine the size of a grandfather clock to test this new material. The research Gupta and his students do could also work in military helmets, preventing brain injuries on the battlefield. So as you can see, this mixture of mechanical, materials, and bioengineering has applications everywhere, from the research lab to the football field and beyond!

*polymer: a chemical compound formed from long chains of the same molecule group (example: plastics)

Read more about Professor Gupta's work here:

http://www.mae.ucla.edu/news/news-archive/2013/vijay-gupta-making-football-helmets-safer-to-prevent-concussions