Development of a model of the human brain using hexahedral finite elements

• Autor(a) principal: Gomes, Marcos António Spínola Monteiro
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/36441
• topic: Brain; Hexahedral; Finite element

Traumatic brain injury is a significant problem worldwide, particularly in the United States of America, where 1.7 million TBIs are documented annually. The tests required for this assessment are very complex. Tests on cadavers may raise serious ethical questions, and in-vivo crash tests are not viable. In this context, there is a great need for developing finite element models of the human head, such as the YEAHM, developed by members of the University of Aveiro. For this reason, this dissertation aims to improve the YEAHM, especially its brain components, by studying how it behaves under different finite element types. The finite element formulation is of utmost importance for the general accuracy and efficiency of the models. Several validations were performed, comparing the simulation results against the experimental results. The simulations with hexahedral elements, under specific conditions, obtained better results with a lower computational cost.