14 DAY TRIAL // Wearing bicycle helmets is mandatory when cruising down the street, and also indicated for your own safety. With use, these safety equipments, most often made out of plastic, tend to get more frail, and also to crack in some spots. But users frequently cannot tell the difference, and continue wearing them. When they are involved in an accident, the helmet gives way and breaks, allowing for serious injuries to take place. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute, in Germany, have recently developed a new alarm system, that lets users know when their protective helmets are damaged, AlphaGalileo reports.
The process was made possible through a collaboration of scientists from the Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials IWM in Freiburg with colleagues from the Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology UMSICHT, in Oberhausen. What the team basically did was devise a method of introducing small capsules of odoriferous oils inside the material the helmets are made out of. Whenever a crack occurs, the capsules at that location are ruptured, and the oils break loose. They emit a very distinct and stinky smell, and can easily capture the attention of their wearers.
“Cyclists often replace their helmets unnecessarily after dropping them on the ground, because they cannot tell whether they are damaged or not. The capsules eliminate this problem. If cracks form, smelly substances are released,” IWM research scientist and study team member Dr-Ing Christof Koplin explains. The work addresses a serious problem among cyclists who take their own safety seriously. At this point, these individuals have no way of knowing when their helmets are fissured, and so they tend to buy a new one from time to time. But they never know when they are throwing away a perfectly-good helmet, and so the new materials could help them solve this problem.
“Our method of detection by smell offers several advantages. It not only indicates when safety-critical polymer components need to be replaced. The exuding smells also enable damage outside the safety range to be detected,” Koplin adds. “Melamine formaldehyde resin proved to be the most suitable encapsulation material in the comparison we conducted of the material systems. Inside the capsule there is a porous, hardly deformable silicon oxide core which absorbs the odoriferous substance. This core produced the best results. Smell detection is already in use for coated metal components. We are applying the process for the first time to polymer materials. Work on the capsules has finished and we are now completing characterizing tests on individual configurations,” he concludes.