This is how you make a better football helmet

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) campus in Gaithersburg, Md., is large and dotted with low, bunker-like buildings. As I walk across the compound one gray afternoon herds of deer are grazing peacefully in the grassy areas between the buildings.
At the materials building I’m greeted by scientist Mike Riley and a colleague, Aaron Forster. They lead me down a florescent hallway towards their materials testing lab, and tell me about the Head Health Initiative, the story I’m in Gaithersburg to cover.
The initiative was launched by the NFL and GE in 2013 (Under Armour later joined as another sponsor) with the goal of accelerating concussion research, diagnosis and treatment. The initiative has two component parts — a four-year, $40 million research program and, more importantly to the involvement of NIST, three open innovation challenges spanning five years.

Challenges I and II have passed — NIST first became involved in Challenge III, a challenge that specifically seeks to identify helmet materials that can mitigate the effects of impact.
Challenge III began in January 2015. In total, 125 different materials (helmet pads, shells or both) were initially submitted. This list was then narrowed down through proposal reviews and testing until, on Dec. 15, 2015, the five first-round winners were announced.
These five winners were each granted $250,000 for the advancement of their work, and over the course of the next year the teams will continue to refine their materials with testing help from NIST. One overall winner will be selected in fall 2016, and given a $500,000 grand prize.
NIST joined Challenge III because developing standards for materials and the tests that evaluate these standards is precisely what Riley and Forster, and the NIST materials science labs more generally, do. Riley and Forster tell me that before they started working on helmet materials they were testing stab-resistant body armors. The duo say they don’t have any particular interest in football, but working on this project has definitely changed what they find themselves thinking about when watching the sport.
NIST is not involved in picking winners in Challenge III (neither are the NFL, GE or Under Armour, for that matter) — that responsibility falls to a panel of expert judges. NIST is, however, in charge of testing the submitted materials against each other, against other available materials and against various measures of compression, resistance and distribution of force.
So what makes great helmet material?
The answer to this is complicated. When it comes to how different kinds of impact affect the brain there are a lot of factors to consider. So one thing Riley and Forster are looking for in new materials is the ability to be optimized to different situations.

In a testing lab Riley hands me samples of three different materials — a piece of traditional football helmet padding, a piece of a slightly newer variety of padding and a piece of memory foam. Even to an untrained eye and hand the three are strikingly different. The problem with these options, Riley tells me, is that the characteristics of the materials cannot be optimized.
Next, he introduces me to the five winning materials. These range from a bound pile of off-the-shelf foams and rubbers, to a fancy origami-like 3D-printed material. Some are soft and supple while others are shockingly (to this reporter at least) hard. They’ve been created by labs or researchers anywhere from Maine to California. In short, they’re all super different too.
At this point a diversity of materials is exactly what Riley and Forster like to see. All five winning materials have performed well in an impact test, but moving forward they’ll be subjected to things like repetitive impact or impact at especially high or low temperatures, Forster said.
The material that minimizes momentum transfer and maximizes energy absorption across NIST’s tests will be in good stead to be crowned Head Health Challenge III winner in 2016.
Truth be told, the samples look nondescript lying under laboratory lights. But somewhere down the line these innovations could make a huge difference in the safety of children, professional athletes and others.