Coupled foot-shoe-ground interaction model to assess landing impact transfer characteristics to ground condition

This paper investigates the effects of sports ground materials on the transfer characteristics of the landing impact force using a coupled foot-shoe-ground interaction model. The impact force resulting from the collision between the sports shoe and the ground is partially dissipated, but the remaining portion transfers to the human body via the lower extremity. However, since the landing impact force is strongly influenced by the sports ground material we consider four different sports grounds, asphalt, urethane, clay and wood. We use a fully coupled 3-D foot-shoe-ground interaction model and we construct the multi-layered composite ground models. Through the numerical simulation, the landing impact characteristics such as the ground reaction force (GRF), the acceleration transfer and the frequency response characteristics are investigated for four different sports grounds. It was found that the risk of injury, associated with the landing impact, was reduced as the ground material changes from asphalt to wood, from the fact that both the peak vertical acceleration and the central frequency monotonically decrease from asphalt to wood. As well, it was found that most of the impact acceleration and frequency was dissipated at the heel, then not much changed from the ankle to the knee.