BIOMECHANICAL ANALYSIS OF WOODPECKER’S PECKING PROCESS

Abstract

Head injuries in car crashes, sport accidents, falls and military attacks can cause deaths and severe neurological diseases. Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) is the main culprit for the fatalities and abnormalities caused by such accidents. Compared to human, in nature, the woodpecker birds exhibit extraordinary head impact injury resistance. In daily lives, woodpeckers peck trunks to search for food, prey for insects, and tunnel holes for nesting. As reported in the previous studies, the maximum pecking velocity is about 6-7 m/s, and the maximum linear deceleration of woodpecker head is about 1000g (g is the gravitational acceleration) while the tolerable head accelerations for humans is 4 to 6g. This project work is a biomechanical analysis of woodpeckers’ pecking mechanism to understand how is it able to protects itself from brain injury even after being continuously subjected to severe impact and rotational loading. The insights gained by this study would prove to be valuable for bio-mimicking this mechanism in head protection equipment and also has many industrial applications which involve severe rotational and linear acceleration/deceleration loading. The novelty in this work is the inclusion of the rotational kinematics of woodpecker head in the study. Additionally, the project work discusses various mechanisms that the woodpecker might be possibly employing for enhancing its performance and also protecting itself from any kind of head injuries. Finite element model of woodpecker head is used to perform the computational study. Experimental data, which were obtained by performing experiments on living woodpeckers by previous researchers, are used to make sure our model is valid to perform simulations. Lastly, a three dimensional woodpecker head model is developed in MIMICS Research 21.0 and 3 – Matic Research 13.0 using CT scan image processing. This 3D model will enhance the accuracy of obtained results and if future work involving woodpecker head is conducted, the use of this model will become important.