Development of a multi-layered skin simulant for burn injury evaluation of protective fabrics exposed to low radiant heat

To simulate temperature rise of human skin and to predict burn injury during radiant heat exposure, the traditional method is to use a sensor to simulate skin surface and use a numerical model to simulate heat transfer in inner skin. However, the numerical models of skin burns are based on few experimental data of nude skin and some simplifications of human skin characteristics. In this study, a new multi-layered skin simulant is presented for low radiant heat exposures up to 15 kW/m(2). The skin simulant has implanted thermocouples into layered polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) materials with controlled thermal properties and thicknesses of the skin layers. The multi-layered skin simulant developed in this study has a good reproducibility for temperature measurements with similar temperature rise profiles compared with human skin except at skin surface. For burn injury prediction, the results of our PDMS skin model can be linearly corrected using ASTM model as a reference. Our developed skin simulant provides an advanced method to directly simulate the heat transfer inside human skin in a multi-layered structure rather than using the combined physical sensor-numerical model in the traditional way.