Latest innovation brings cycle helmets made from paper

Submitted by: The Two Sides Team January 13, 2014

The secret ingredient for a safer bike helmet – paper!Lying flat in the middle of the road doesn’t usually inspire a eureka
moment. But for one man, having a potentially serious bike accident got
him thinking about a new future for helmet design. “I was riding my bike
down a hill, wearing a helmet and a guy opened his car door,” says
Anirudha Surabhi, who lives in London. “I hit the door, did a couple of
somersaults and fell straight on my head. My helmet was completely
cracked, completely unusable.” Luckily for him, Anirudha was able to
walk away from the accident with whiplash and mild concussion. But the
sight of his mangled helmet got the then design student thinking about
new ways of protecting cyclists. His unusual solution was to substitute
the standard polystyrene design with intricately engineered paper – a
decision that’s already proving to be a hit with bike-lovers.

But
how can paper be safer? And what else can it offer to the future of
head protection? “The danger with falling off your bike is that you
subject your head to a dramatic change of speed in just a fraction of a
second,” says Jolyon Carroll, a safety researcher at the UK’s Transport
Research Laboratory. “When you hit the pavement your hard skull will
stop or decelerate quickly. However, being a relatively soft organ, your
brain tends to keep going. If you imagine dropping a blancmange onto a
plate then you can see how bits at the back start compressing and piling
up against other bits of brain at the front,” he told the BBC. “It’s
this action that puts you at risk of injury – from breaking blood
vessels to damaging brain tissue.”

The basic idea behind cycle
helmets is to create a mini crumple zone – a bit like you’d find in a
car – that absorbs some of the energy and gives your skull and brain
more time to slow down before coming to a stop. Those extra few
milliseconds can reduce the amount of compression in the brain and
potentially make the difference between brain damage and a mild case of
concussion.

At the moment, the material used to protect us in a
crash is polystyrene. But Anirudha Surabhi isn’t convinced that it’s the
best choice for the job. Instead, he decided to look to the natural
world for inspiration. “The animal that stood out was the woodpecker. It
pecks at about ten times per second and every time it pecks it sustains
the same amount of force as us crashing at 50 miles per hour,” says
Surabhi. “It’s the only bird in the world where the skull and the beak
are completely disjointed, and there’s a soft corrugated cartilage in
the middle that absorbs all the impact and stops it from getting a
headache.”

In order to mimic the woodpecker’s crumple zone,
Anirudha turned to a cheap and easily accessible source – paper. He
engineered it into a double-layer of honeycomb that could then be cut
and constructed into a functioning helmet. “What you end up with is with
tiny little airbags throughout the helmet,” he says. “So when you have a
crash, what these airbags do is they go pop, pop, pop, pop, pop – and
they go all the way to the bottom, without the helmet cracking. That’s
what absorbs the energy. “

The paper design has been tested to
European standards, and when compared to a standard polystyrene helmet,
the results are impressive. “If you crash at 15 miles per hour in a
normal helmet, your head will be subjected to around 220G [G-force],
whereas the new design absorbs more of the impact and means you
experience around 70G instead,” says Surabhi. To put that into context,
international safety standards recognise that to avoid serious brain
damage, a person must not be exposed to impact forces above 300G. This
means that while a polystyrene helmet helps you to avoid fatal or
serious head injury, the paper helmet will give your head more time to
slow down and potentially lower the risk of even less serious injuries
like concussion.

Anirudha’s paper helmet is already in the shops
and joins a growing range of innovative alternatives to the polystyrene
model. He also has new ideas in the pipeline for his honeycomb design,
including a flat-pack version suitable for cyclists using city bike hire
schemes. Of course, debate still rages over whether helmets really help
protect cyclists at all – with arguments ranging from the
ineffectiveness of polystyrene to the mere act of wearing a helmet
encouraging cyclists to take more risks and drivers to be less cautious.
But an independent review by the Transport Research Laboratory in 2009
found that assuming they are worn correctly, cycle helmets should be
effective at reducing the risk of head injury.

As wearing cycle
helmets is not compulsory in the UK, then the choice is down to the
individual rider. But will that choice really stretch to paper helmets?
“I think the public will accept it because if you think about it,
stuntmen have been jumping onto cardboard boxes for decades, which are
all made out of paper,” says Anirudha Surabhi. “They risk their lives
from five-storey buildings purely because they know that paper actually
works.”

This story, written by Anna Lacey, originally appeared on the BBC News website.

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