Remote Pressure Wave Effects in The Spine and Internal Organs
In a study of a handgun injury, Sturtevant found that pressure waves from a bullet impact in the torso can reach the spine and that a focusing effect from concave surfaces can concentrate the pressure wave on the spinal cord producing significant injury. This is consistent with other work showing remote spinal cord injuries from ballistic impacts.
Roberts et al. present both experimental work and finite element modeling showing that there can be considerable pressure wave magnitudes in the thoracic cavity for handgun projectiles stopped by a Kevlar vest. For example, an 8 gram projectile at 360 m/s impacting a NIJ level II vest over the sternum can produce an estimated pressure wave level of nearly 2.0 MPa (280 psi) in the heart and a pressure wave level of nearly 1.5 MPa (210 psi) in the lungs. Impacting over the liver can produce an estimated pressure wave level of 2.0 MPa (280 psi) in the liver.
Read more about this topic: Hydrostatic Shock
Famous quotes containing the words remote, pressure, wave, effects, spine, internal and/or organs:
“I have no expectation that any man will read history aright who thinks that what has been done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing to-day.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“Now I stand as one upon a rock,
Environed with a wilderness of sea,
Who marks the waxing tide grow wave by wave,
Expecting ever when some envious surge
Will in his brinish bowels swallow him.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Trade and commerce, if they were not made of India-rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way; and, if one were to judge these men wholly by the effects of their actions and not partly by their intentions, they would deserve to be classed and punished with those mischievous persons who put obstructions on the railroads.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Much of a man’s character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“We all run on two clocks. One is the outside clock, which ticks away our decades and brings us ceaselessly to the dry season. The other is the inside clock, where you are your own timekeeper and determine your own chronology, your own internal weather and your own rate of living. Sometimes the inner clock runs itself out long before the outer one, and you see a dead man going through the motions of living.”
—Max Lerner (b. 1902)
“Not ringed but rare, not gilled but polyp-like, having sprung up
overnight—
These mushrooms of the gods, resembling human organs uprooted,
rooted only on the air,”
—William Jay Smith (b. 1918)