Researchers at Michigan State University have refined an innovation that has the potential to improve safety, reduce severe injury and increase survival rates in situations ranging from car accidents, sports, law enforcement operations and more. In 2020 and 2022, Weiyi Lu, an associate professor in MSU’s College of Engineering, developed a liquid nanofoam material made up of tiny holes surrounded by water that has been shown to protect the brain against traumatic injuries when used as a liner in football helmets. Now, MSU engineers and scientists have improved this technology to shield vital internal organs as well.
Falls, motor vehicle crashes and other kinds of collisions can cause blunt force trauma and damage to bodily organs that can lead to life-threatening emergencies. These injuries are often the result of intense mechanical force or pressure that doesn’t penetrate the body like a cut, but causes serious damage to the body’s organs, including internal lacerations, ruptures, bleeding and organ failure.
Lu and Yun Liang, an assistant professor in the College of Osteopathic Medicine, have teamed up to see how the liquid nanofoam could protect internal organs in the event of blunt force trauma.
“We improved the liquid nanofoam by adjusting its protective response to match biological organs,” said Lu. “Then, we sealed the liquid nanofoam material inside a plastic pouch about the size of a quarter and made the new protection layer flexible and moldable enough to be worn comfortably against the body.”
To test the capabilities of Lu’s liquid nanofoam, the pouch was used as a protective cover and laid over a tissue sample and compressed by a machine with enough force to mimic a blunt force trauma event.
“For the first time, we are trying to understand how trauma is introduced by mechanical force and effectively mitigated it by using liquid nanofoam,” said Liang. “We are trying to understand the force needed to damage an internal organ, which will be then converted into the future design criteria for protective materials.”
Lu and Liang found that the liquid nanofoam could withstand the mechanical force equal to a blunt force trauma without damaging biological tissue. Liang and her team demonstrated that the liquid nanofoam protected multiple biological tissues, including the liver, kidneys, heart and lungs, from forces and pressures equal to blunt force trauma injuries.
“I could see with my eyes that there’s literally no damage,” said Liang. “I was totally amazed.”
Future applications of the liquid nanofoam could include using it as a protective layer inside an automobile’s framework, to line the walls of an earthquake-proof room or to wear it close to the body as a protective vest that could have multiple applications to save lives and prevent tissue and organ damage from blunt force trauma events.
The paper was published in Nature Scientific Reports and this research is supported by the MSU Tetrad Initiative for interdisciplinary research.