VIKING vs. Downloaded from http://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/memagazineselect/article-pdf/132/03/44/6357215/me-2010-mar5.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021 SAMUR AI? An ME Knows Who Would Win. By Alan S. Brown, Associate Editor

f a samurai fought a Viking, who would win? for answers. When he start- The samurai would have undergone years of ed at it two years ago, Des- rigorous training and wielded his famed kata- moulin was a graduate medical na sword. The Viking would have come from engineering student studying a warrior culture whose battle-axes terrorized combat helmet design and blast Europe for centuries. injuries at Wayne State University. How do you resolve an argument like that? He is currently working at a biomed- You call in a mechanical engineer. After ical devices company while pursuing a all, someone has to measure the effect those Ph.D. in mechanical engineering at the weapons have on armor and shield, flesh and bone. It’s University of Calgary. not very different from the methodology automakers use Desmoulin also holds a black belt in karate and served for crash dummies or the military uses to assess weapons in the Canadian military. He was a firefighter and an and defense. emergency medical technician. Spike, the cable TV channel, raises the question weekly “They wanted a guy like me, and I fell into it by acci- in its series Deadliest Warrior. It relies on Geoff Desmoulin dent,” Desmoulin said. “Although I had to learn to take the engineering terms, like ‘energy transfer’ or ‘modu- WInstrumenting weapons and armor showed that Viking chain mail lus,’ out of my explanations.” could withstand the slashing attack of a Samurai katana. The show pits fighters with different styles of fighting who never met—Spartan vs. ninja or Apache vs. gladi- ator—against one another. The show’s experts include a doctor, a computer programmer, and Desmoulin, the go-to guy for figuring out the impact of ancient arms. They feed their findings into a Monte Carlo simulation that runs hundreds of simulations and picks the most likely winner. Before Desmoulin could measure weapons, he had to determine how they really behaved. Some of the answers surprised him. Take, for example, the ball-and-chain. Action fans might remember it from Braveheart, when Mel Gibson uses one.

SPIKE DIGITAL ENTERTAINMENT INC. ENTERTAINMENT SPIKE DIGITAL “From that scene, you would think the ball-and-chain

44 mechanical engineering | March 2010 was not a hard weapon to wield. Gibson swings it with started his swing and lost control. He was wearing hard one hand and gets it right in the guy’s face,” Desmoulin shell foam armor, but it wouldn’t have done anything. said. “Our expert needed two hands to control it, and it The lack of control made it hard to align the impact plane was not a killing tool. It was used to break the ranks of the with the accelerometer,” Desmoulin said. army lined up in front of you, then you’d rush in to attack. Engineering in service of a bloody spectacle has made Downloaded from http://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/memagazineselect/article-pdf/132/03/44/6357215/me-2010-mar5.pdf by guest on 24 September 2021

VThe Deadliest Warrior team uses ballistic shells to replicate the SPIKE DIGITAL ENTERTAINMENT INC. ENTERTAINMENT SPIKE DIGITAL multilayered resistance of the body to impact. They then use the data to drive Monte Carlo simulations of battles. Its impact was like getting hit by a heavyweight boxer.” The morningstar was a killing weapon, a spiked metal Deadliest Warrior a hit. It averaged 1.8 million viewers per mass attached by a chain to a wooden handle. Measuring broadcast, and between 600,000 and nearly 1 million its impact proved a challenge. views per episode online (www.spike.com/show/31082). “Because the spiked mass moves independently of the From what Desmoulin can tell from demographics, fan handle, measuring the handle is meaningless,” Desmoul- mail, and social media, many of his fans are students who in said. Instead, he measured the impact of the mass on study engineering—or who want to. “One of the most the head of a gel torso. rewarding things is having high school students ask what “We put a 3-D accelerometer on one side and hit the they need to get into engineering.” other,” he said. “We multiplied the acceleration of the 8 Meanwhile, the show continues to surprise him. Take kilogram head mass to find the force and divided by the the samurai and Viking, for example. cross-section of a spike. We found it had 16 times the “My prediction was that the samurai would have cut pressure needed to fracture the skull.” the Viking to pieces,” he said. “But it turns out that It sounds simple, but it was not. The morningstar expert Viking chain mail armor was very effective at dispersing could barely control the weapon. “Once, he almost hit the impact of the samurai katana, which was a slashing himself in the leg. Another time, he hit something as he weapon. The Viking took him.” Q

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