Thanks to Sandra from Australia (of Competitive Cycling fame) for sending me an image of a helmet involved in a crash. Its branded Tioga. Her friend was descending from Mt. Coot-tha when the person took a bad spill that ended up putting some serious cuts and bruises to the face and breaking a couple of vertebrates as well.
The lid is completely destroyed. Whether a helmet saves your life or not may be still moot, but keep staring at the picture above.
What do you think? Did it do its "as designed job"? Does it look too fragile? Perhaps one of the commentators, Richard Keatinge, from my "How a Bicycle Helmet Works" post will be very interested in this image. Comment away.
8 comments:
It doesn't look like the helmet had much of a chance to deform, the top seems to have sheared off. The idea of the foam helmets is they compress to absorb impact energy. That looks like a manufacturing defect to me.
I'll stick to name brand helmets...
Ron,
This image is looking very suspicious to me at best.
I didn't read anything about brain trauma, so it worked, plain and simple. Possibly a face plant (endo) where the forehead impacted first, the helmet shattered from the impact, then her face slid across the ground. Where is the rest of the plastic? The scratches on the plastic always tell the true story on where the impact was.
Thanks! That fills in some questions we had about how he crashed. Wish we had another closeup, because to some it would seem like the foam just cracked, and to some, it may seem like it crushed and then fell apart from the helmet. Thanks Richard for your insight, and Surestick, your point goes with my thinking of putting too many vents than needed in a helmet that I feel takes something away from the structural rigidity of the helmet.
I would say that the foam in the helmet certainly did its job, keeping the person from getting brain damage or being killed due to significant brain injury. The shell, I thought, was supposed to be intact, but depending on the impact, I guess not all shells can do that. In my opinion, if the person is still alive, it did its job regardless of the outcome of the helmet. Don't forget too, helmets are designed to sustain one collision, and you should never wear a helmet that has been in a crash, no matter how little the impact was.
I'd be dead without the awesome technology put into the helmets today, so I'm glad that the technology has gotten a lot better. No matter how "ridiculous" you think the helmet makes you look, always choose safety over fashion!
I believe the better name brand helmets have a skeleton of some kind in the foam to keep the foam from breaking apart like this.
Last summer I went over the bars at about 35mph landed on my head then my back. The inner halo size adjuster broke loose from the helmet but the rest stayed in tack which I think it was designed to work.
It was a Bell Sweep R
Helmet foam (unlike "foam rubber") is made to partially aborb energy by cracking. Under the low speed impacts that helmets are really made for, the helmet normally won't come apart. But it is substantially weakened by the impact which is why you should replace a helmet after an impact, even if it looks fine.
A helmet shattering like this one is normal for this powerful an impact (40 mph into a solid object). It probably absorbed quite a bit of energy and did give the wearer some protection. But bycycle helmet design standards are such that they are not really made for this powerful an impact. The legal design and testing requirements are more based around low speed falls.
My two cents on the whole helmet debate - helmets save lives. But helmet laws kill by discouraging cycling, reducing the number of bikes on the road, which has been shown to make riding more dangerous for those that continue to do it.
Anon : New studies from groups of hospitals show that an individual is more likely to suffer brain injury without wearing a helmet. Saving lives vs discouraging cycling...you weigh whats more important.
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