Optimal pressure comfort design for pilot helmets

Abstract

With the development of high-performance fighters, the function of pilot helmets is also constantly upgrading, and helmet-mounted display (HMD) has become a future development trend. To solve the inter-restriction between the eye position control and the pressure comfort under high overloads of pilot helmets, this paper optimizes the helmet design by building a head-helmet finite element model: (1) Under a 10 G overload, the deformation of helmet soft liner should not exceed 2 mm; and (2) The combination of liner materials used in various areas should satisfy the requirements of most comfortable head pressure distribution (P_front: P_top: P_side: P_back = 2:2:1:3). The study on 46 different combinations of materials finds that the helmet can meet both the eye position maintenance requirement under overloads and the requirement of comfortable pressure distribution when linear elastic materials with Young’s modulus of 1000 pa, 55000 pa and 65000 pa are used for the side, top and front parts of the head, and nonlinear elastic hyperfoam material with two-fold stress variation is used for the head back area.

Keywords:

• Helmet
• finite element analysis
• optimal design
• pressure comfort

Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Mu Qiao and Dr. Xuguang Wang for helpful conversations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the [National Key Technology R&D Program] under [grant number 2014BAK01B05], and [National Natural Science Foundation of China] under [grant number 81741123].