Xenith: Football helmet technology that is changing the game for athletes.

“The genesis of Xenith was basically: there’s gotta be a better way.”

Athletes who play American Football regularly face high-impact tackles, the force of which can feel like being hit by a baby whale. As more research is being done into the potential effects of repeated head trauma on an athlete’s health, there is a renewed focus on safety measures in the sport being driven from the top down by the NFL.

Xenith was founded in 2006 by Vin Ferrara, who had played college football as a quarterback and was interested in creating a new game-changing type of helmet. Xenith’s unique approach is to use adaptive technology which allows the helmet to move independently to the athlete’s head on impact, protecting them from the majority of the force. Now, Xenith’s helmets are used across the globe and the company makes various different types of protective equipment including helmets, shoulder pads and core guards from their headquarters in Detroit, Michigan.

In this episode Chief Engineer Ron Jadischke takes us around their HQ to demonstrate some of the impact testing performed on their new helmets and explain the technology “under the hood” of certain models.

We also hear from Brian Thompson, who head’s up PTC’s CAD division, to talk about how PTC’s CREO technology can help Xenith find new ways to improve athlete safety.

Xenith is a customer of PTC partner PDSVision.

Find out more about Xenith here.

Find out more about CREO here.

Your host is Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC.

Episodes are released bi-weekly. Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for updates.

Third Angle is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive producer is Jacqui Cook. Sound design and editing by Ollie Guillou. Location recording by Bryce Huffman. And music by Rowan Bishop. 

Transcript

Welcome to Third Angle, where we put the strength of American football helmets to the test

I’m your host Paul Haimes, from industrial software company PTC. In this podcast we share the moments where digital transforms physical, and meet the brilliant minds behind some of the most innovative products around the world - each powered by PTC technology.

American Football players have to deal with a lot during their careers. Some of the hardest tackles they’ll face will feel like being hit by a baby whale. So as thousands of pounds of force slam into them - athletes need to be prepared - and protected.

A big part of that protection comes down to what’s on their head. Now, you may look at a football helmet and think it’s no different to any other helmet. But the amount of technology ‘under the hood’ will blow you away. The engineering that goes into a Xenith helmet in particular is second to none.

Xenith is a company dedicated to safety - pioneering brand-new ways to keep athletes safe on the field, supported by PTC partner PDS Vision. Our producer Bryce Huffman went to Xenith’s headquarters in Detroit, Michigan, to meet Chief Engineer Ron Jadischke.

So Xenith was founded in 2006 by a Harvard quarterback. He was an MD from Columbia University. The genesis of Xenith was basically, there's got to be a better way.

The first helmet that Xenith ever developed was known as the X-1 helmet. So Xenith’s technology really focuses on fit. The X-1 helmet has what we refer to as an adaptive-fit technology. So there was a cable in the X-1 helmet that was attached to the lower chinstrap. When you cinch down on the chinstrap, it would tighten the cable to give you a nice firm fit around your head. The other piece of the component that Xenith had was basically these adjustable comfort pads. So the adaptive-fit technology is really something that sets Xenith aside from the competition. 

The other big differentiator is this concept of decoupling the head or decoupling the padding from the shell. The way that Xenith’s technology works is it has this shock matrix, which has these pods that are connected to a floating plate on the inside. And that's only connected to the shell in a couple of different locations. So when an impact happens, the impact will happen with the shell, but the padding is connected to your head. So the shell has this ability to move in a decoupled manner, relative to the padding and relative to your head. That's the genesis behind the Xenith technology. Shock absorbers is another part of Xenith’s  technology. The shock absorbers have this small hole in them, so it's a sealed system that has air on the inside and it'll perform one stiffness when it's under a lower speed impact, but when you have air in a pressurised cylinder, if you try to push it out really fast, it becomes harder to push that air out, so it stiffens the shock pod. That's this stiffening effect, so you can perform better on high-speed impacts and also well on low-speed impacts at the same time. That's a really big part of the challenge in protective equipment: being able to protect against low speed and high speed.

So right now we're in the Xenith test lab. We have a few different pieces of impact-test equipment that I will talk you through right now. Here we have a couple of drop towers that we use on a regular basis. This is that part of the ongoing quality control testing that we would do and even developmental testing. The way the drop test happens is, there's a head form that gets mounted to this carriage here. This particular one is a head form that would represent an average adult male. That head form is mounted to this carriage, we connect the drop-tower mechanism to the carriage, and this is all pneumatically controlled right now. Once the drop tower is connected to the carriage, then we'll bring the drop tower in the head form up to its height. Once it's reached its height, which dictates the speed that it’s going to fall at, we'll let go of the carriage and it falls down and impacts the flat pad below.

So that would have been simulating the highest speed drop tests that we would do. It's about 18 feet per second, which is a pretty severe impact, roughly five and a half metres per second to do the conversion. Depending on the helmet, on a helmet that had forum Gs of over 100 Gs potentially, our real pass-fail criteria is a different metric than Gs. It's called severity index and that's an injury biomechanics metric that originated right here in Detroit at Wayne State University.

There has been a pretty steady conversation about the health of the athletes. There's always a focus on player health, as far as head injuries and concussion goes, and a lot of the changes I've seen along the way have been driven from the top down, from the NFL level, as well as what the NFL has done through their ranking system to drive high-performance helmets to be out on the field. In the future, I think there's going to be this drive for more high-performance materials, integrating those high-performance materials more tightly, incorporating engineering into the development process and being as efficient with your protection or your equipment development as possible. Probably the biggest pinch-yourself moment that I've had, and probably several members of the group here at Xenith, was being part of the NFL Helmet Challenge that began back in the fall of 2019. It was a global challenge that was put out by the NFL and NFLPA, under their Head Health Tech Challenge protocol, to develop a game-changing helmet. So we thought, why wouldn't we compete? Why wouldn't we be a part of this, because this is what we're here to do and change the game. So we put through some proposals to be a part of that challenge and were successful and competed in that challenge for about a two-year programme. It was just a great experience for everyone involved here, as well as the partners that we worked with, and definitely paints a bright future for the products down the road.

The other piece of impact testing that we do, and this is part of, again, that Noxee standard, known as the linear-impact test, or the pneumatic-rim impact test. That pneumatic rim gets propelled at different speeds. This particular one we're going to do is probably around five metres per second or six metres per second. The system's capable of going all the way up to 10 metres per second, which would be able to simulate those super-elite, professional athletes. So that rim gets projected at this stationary headform and you'll see that the head and neck will move and then pull the table along with it. It's a pretty big impact, you'll see when we run it.

The next series of helmets was the X-2 helmet, which came out in about 2011. There were some upgrades to the technology there. Then right around 2014, we came out with the X-2E, and the Epic. These are the two shells, two different helmet models that you'll see here. The big step we took forward with the Epic is we introduced something new, which is called the multi-stage shock. We refer to the initial shock design as a dual-stage shock, which means that it's like a pod, essentially. That's the single stage. The second stage is that pneumatic effect that I explained, then the third stage of this multi-stage shock is that centre section of the shock, which can rotate and shear in different directions upon impact, just to improve that rotational effect. And with X-2E, we also added in different shock heights as well, to bolster performance in different impact locations. 

Was this one actually worn by a University of Miami player? 

It may not have been worn, but it is autographed. Looks like it's Ray Lewis.

I’m sure taking a picture of this.

So this would have been after Ray Lewis was not in college anymore. What would be the main difference between this helmet and your newest models?

We've since sunset the Epic helmet and we have the X-2E+ in our model line-up. We have the Shadow and we have the Shadow XR. The X2E+, we refer to as our workhorse. It has more of that traditional look, still uses that kind of legacy Xenith technology. In 2019, we introduced the Xenith Shadow helmet. We’ve got a little more streamlined look to it. You can see the centre Mohawk region, a little more aggressive look, a little more aggressive feel compared to our more traditional X-2E. The Shadow shell is moving away from that traditional hard plastic shell, it’s a quasi flexible shell. This particular element right here is flexible compared to if you were to pick up something like this guy right here. It's a little tougher.

So that is the Xenith Shadow helmet, which is still available. It's on the NFL rankings. It's within the green section on the NFL app rankings, which means it's a recommended helmet. Then this here is our newest helmet model. This is called our Shadow XR. This is really an evolution of what I was talking about earlier, as far as the shock technology goes. The Xenith pods allowed us to have a geometry effect and a pneumatic effect to the shocks. But you get to a certain level where there's maybe other ways to approach it. That's really what we did with the Shadow XR helmet. The Shadow XR helmet, we spent a lot of time developing the geometries that were used in here. What we were trying to focus on was a linear-impact performance to reduce those G forces, and then a rotational-impact performance, which is to reduce the rotational forces. So the Shadow XR, and this is where we landed, we have these castle-style geometries that can perform stiff in a linear impact, but they can also shear very easily for a rotational impact, amplifying the effect of this floating shock bonnet within the helmet shell. The other differentiator is Shadow XR is the material we're using. The material we're using is highly rate dependent. It's quite soft to touch and feel, which is a nice feel if you're putting the helmet on your head, or it's also performs well with those 1000s of impacts that a player might see on the season, on the field. Also, the material itself has the chemical properties to stiffen up and perform like a play dough or Plasticine, where it really rigidifies and stiffens upon impact. That gets you the highest level impact performance for those one in a 1000 type hits.

Like if Ray Lewis was running full speed.

That was Ron Jadischke. Now Xenith is known for being uncompromising when it comes to its sports protective gears’ design, fit, feel and performance and for that, they use Creo. It’s time to meet our expert, Brian Thompson, who heads up PTC’s CAD division. Now, Brian, because of the organic shape of the helmets, a lot of the development of the shell takes careful surfacing work. So could you start by explaining Creo surfacing tools and and also what role they play in the design process at Xenith itself? 

Yeah, sure. It's really interesting, because we've seen an evolution of surfacing technology in Creo over the past decade. There's been increased pressure on making really nicely, finely controlled organic surfaces on the exterior of, say, customer-visible surfaces, on the exterior of components in the electronics market, in the automotive market, in aerospace and defence, and now in markets like the one that Xenith performs it. With Creo, you have really fine control over surfaces by building out curves, controlling how those curves create the flow of surfaces, controlling how different surfaces meet the continuity that you want at those connection points. It is totally controllable in Creo, so you can build surfaces from the ground up inside Creo, with excellent fine control that makes really beautiful flow lines for the eye to meet. Really powerful. There's also been quite a bit of evolution of what we call freeform surfacing development in Creo, as well, where you start out with a fairly bulbous shape, and you push and pull on a control mesh, and we do all the underlying surface connective controls for you. But you can very rapidly build out something that gets very close to a final shape that you might want. We're finding more and more customers are using this freeform surfacing approach to early prototyping, but realising the surfaces are so good that they might actually bring them into production. The different techniques are wildly different. It's in some respects it’s a bit of trading control for speed. It's really up to the user to decide how they want to proceed and what service technologies they want. We're finding them being mixed more and more in the same designs in recent years. 

Thanks, Brian, really interesting explanation on the surfacing tools, and also the flexibility that they provide as well at Xenith. Now, the other area we want to touch on today is around the use of advanced assembly extension at Xenith because Xenith themselves are doing some interesting things there. Could you explain to the listeners a little bit about what they're doing at Xenith with AAX? 

It's a great segway to talk about different surfacing and modelling approaches, then talk about advanced assembly capabilities in Creo. Often times, advanced assembly capabilities are thought of as a way to manage very large assemblies and contributions from, say, multiple design contributors across a very large, dispersed team. And that's all true. But in the case of Xenith, you could see a scenario where you have wildly different modelling techniques being brought together in a single design managed at well-known interfaces. You might in the energy absorption part of the helmet have very different modelling techniques and approaches, then the outer surfaces, like we just discussed, have very finely controlled parametric surfaces. Something like advanced assembly can allow you to manage the interfaces amongst different parts of the helmet that have very different geometric modelling approaches, because they serve very different purposes. Those could very well be contributed by different design engineers that have specific skill sets to deliver the capabilities that those surfaces they need to design have to deliver. So in this case, it's really about managing the contributions of multiple engineers working in the same model that have very different modelling approaches. It's not like a big dispersed team, but still a valuable way of controlling the design.

Thanks to Brian and to Ron for showing us around Xenith’s headquarters.

Please rate, review and subscribe to our bi-weekly Third Angle episodes wherever you listen to your podcasts and follow PTC on LinkedIn and Twitter for future episodes. 

This is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive producer is Jacqui Cook. Sound design and editing by Ollie Guillou. Recording by Bryce Huffman. And music by Rowan Bishop.