BE 575 Injury Biomechanics

Prerequisites: ENM 500 or 510, BE 510 or MEAM 519 or equivalent.  A background in physiology and anatomy is also recommended.

This course is intended as an introduction to investigating the mechanics of injury, from the organism to the tissue level.  The students will be exposed to both formal didactic instruction and selected field work.  The course will cover principles in continuum and analytical mechanics, and will use application in injury research to illustrate these concepts.  The course will be divided into three major units.  The first unit will be an introduction to variational principles of mechanics and calculus of variations, and will apply these concepts to injury problems (e.g., occupant kinematics during a collision, vehicle kinematics, impact to padded surfaces).  Special emphasis will be placed on converting a system input into a body response.  The second unit of the course will be used to discuss the effect of gross body motion on tissue and organ mechanical response.  Material models of biological tissue will be discussed, and examples relating body motion to tissue response will be reviewed.  I

Department of Bioengineering
School of Engineering and Applied Science
University of Pennsylvania
210 S. 33rd Street
Room 240 Skirkanich Hall
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Phone No.: (215) 898-8501
Fax No.: (215) 573-2071
beoffice@seas.upenn.edu

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