Warfighter protection: From Benchtop to battlefield

Our warfighters are exposed to an increasing variety and severity of ballistic, blast, and underbody blast threats on the battlefield. These threats lead to complex injuries that are not well understood, making protection and treatment challenging. Studying injury mechanisms is critical for our warfighters, but recreating these events is dangerous, costly, and difficult to control. To that end, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) has developed several test methods, test surrogates, and models that are being used to controllably create battlefield threat conditions in a laboratory environment and investigate effects of these threats on the human body. Models range from in vitro cellular models to physical test surrogates to computational models of the human body. This article describes some controlled laboratory test methods and test surrogates and devices APL has developed and used to simulate ballistic, blast, and underbody blast battlefield conditions, and provides examples of their use and applicability to understanding battlefield injury.