Importance of skull morphology and blunt impact location in remote fracture initiation

The initiation and propagation of cranial fracture following blunt impact remain poorly understood. To evaluate the significance of intrinsic skull properties on remote fracture initiation, computational models of representative specimens were tested under a variety of extrinsic impact conditions and compared to experimental results. Skull morphology and impact location tended to determine the regions of peak tensile stress that corresponded to common locations of remote fracture initiation observed experimentally.