Eye Protection for Mitigating Soccer-Related Ocular Injuries: A Finite Element Approach

In this work, eye protection for mitigating the soccer ball ocular injuries were delineated with computational models. The retinal injuries and the risk of globe rupture were evaluated in terms of the stress in the posterior retinal layer and the intraocular pressure (IOP) measurement at the center of the vitreous. The mechanism of the eye protection with goggles was quantified in terms of impact indentation and velocity caused at the contact location in the eyeball. Results have shown that both polycarbonate and acrylic goggles can significantly reduce the stress in the retina and IOP at the center of the vitreous by more than 50%. The polycarbonate (PC) goggles remained intact and bounced backward during impact, leading to smaller impact indentation and velocity in the contact region in the eyeball, compared to the fractured acrylic goggles. These findings may be due to the larger fracture toughness modulus of PC compared to acrylic, indicating that the fracture toughness modulus could be an important parameter for the material selection in protection design. The soccer ball-goggles interaction indicate that the local deformation of soccer ball, i.e., backward bending, plays an important role in the eye protection. These mechanistic understandings could serve as a guidance for the eye protection design.