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Football players (and anyone else who takes hard hits) may want to breathe a sigh of relief. Engineers at CU Boulder and Sandia National Laboratories have been hard at work researching and developing a new design for padding that can withstand powerful impacts. 

“If you’re riding your bike and get into a crash, you don’t know if that’s going to be a low-speed impact or a high-speed impact. But regardless, you expect your helmet to perform well,” said Robert MacCurdy, assistant professor in the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering at CU Boulder. “We’re trying to develop a geometry that performs well under all of those scenarios.”

The team’s innovations, which can be printed on commercially available 3D printers, could one day wind up in everything from shipping crates to football pads — anything that helps to protect fragile objects from the bumps of life. 

“Impact mitigation is something that’s important everywhere,” said MacCurdy. “It’s in highway crash barriers, knee pads and elbow pads, and in packaging equipment.”

Currently, some of the most common types of padding materials are foams, which are filled with tiny holes and channels, such as packing peanuts or stress balls. Foams can absorb a lot of force, but if you squeeze them hard enough, they will compress down into a rigid wad. MacCurdy and his colleagues wanted to develop cushioning that would provide protection, regardless of the force of impact.

The group’s new designs look a bit like the cells in a honeycomb. When you squeeze them, the cells collapse, but always following a careful pattern.

Everyday risks may soon be greatly reduced. The researchers put their designs to the test in labs, reporting that the padding could absorb roughly six times more force than standard foams made out of the same material.

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Photos courtesy Wikipedia and Lawrence Smith