Helmet safety project earns award for Quirke

A HURLING Helmet Testing project undertaken by CIT Mechanical Engineering Degree student, Brendan Quirke, has been declared winner of the prestigious ISEA 2005 Sports Engineering Project Competition in London.

Prior to 2005, no Irish safety standards existed regarding hurling helmets. A recent survey at the Eye Casualty Department in the Waterford Regional Hospital determined that, over a 12-month period, 98 individual sports-related eye injuries were treated. Of these, 30% resulted from hurling matches.

Under new legislation, Mycrosports Ltd (a hurling helmet design and manufacturing company), are obliged to forward samples of all new hurling helmet designs to a testing centre in Canada for impact testing.

The aim of Brendan Quirke’s project is to design and build at CIT a test rig capable of projecting a sliotar against a helmet at 100 km/hr to allow assessment of the helmet protection capabilities.

This rig comprises a sliotar accelerator, sliotar velocity measurement system, head form, high-speed camera attachment and caging to contain the sliotar during high-speed rebound.