Riddell Speedflex Precision Diamond Helmet
WINNER of the TCT Consumer Product Award 2019. Submit your design-to-manufacturing innovation for this year’s TCT Awards here.
Cleats meet the crisp green turf, helmet travels from under the arm to over the head, backsides reconvene with the freshly painted seats or forgotten sofas, and the whistle blows.
At once, it marks an end and a beginning. For players, coaches, fans alike, the slowest part of the year comes to an end, and the most turbulent commences. The post-season break and the pre-season warm-up lasted only a few months, but to them it felt like years.
Of course, that cast of people aren’t the only ones who make the spectacle what it is. In any elite-level sport, there’s the broadcasters and pundits dissecting the action and creating the narratives, the governing bodies implementing the rules, and the equipment manufacturers doing their utmost to protect the players. Recently, this trio have found themselves in the midst of one of American Football’s biggest subplots: the debate around concussion.
The rate of this impact injury to the head tends to fluctuate season by season (it dropped by 29% in the 2018/19 campaign, for instance), but since the average NFL playing career lasts six years, there’s more than enough exposure to the possibility. A 2017 study found that chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a neurogenerative disease caused by repeated blows to the head, was found in 177 out of 202 deceased former football players, and within that 110 of 111 former NFL players.
It is a serious issue that the media has been right to spotlight, and the NFL and equipment manufacturers have been right to respond to. The game’s tackling policy is in a seemingly never-ending evolution, and you’d only have to see a chronological slideshow of images to gauge how much the performance of football helmets has transformed since they became mandatory in 1943.
All seven liner pads that are integrated into the Precision Diamond helmet
Riddell has been at the vanguard of the advancement in football helmets since the beginning, from basic leather shells to polycarbonate modernisations with full face visors to where we are with the company’s latest product iteration: The Precision Diamond in partnership with Carbon.
“The foundation for how we approach things is using the latest research and science that’s available into head injuries to design products that reduces the risk and reduces overall head impact exposure to players,” Thad Ide, Riddell’s Senior Vice President of Research and Development, told TCT. “The head impact database that we’ve been collecting with our instrumented helmets for the last 15 years is very valuable in illuminating the different types of head impact profiles that different players in different playing positions, different ages, different skill levels [can experience], and that will affect how helmets are designed and developed in the future. Our precision fit helmet is a first step along those lines.”
It started in Chicago where Riddell, with 70% of the football helmet market share, is headquartered. Three years ago, the company introduced a limited roll out of its precision fit helmet, in which Riddell conducted 3D scans of the players’ heads in order to design and produce helmets that fit perfectly to their head shape – nobody else can wear it comfortably. The helmets are fitted with sensors, recording every impact it takes, passing information to the medical staff on the side-line in real-time, and storing much more for download to allow coaches to review periodically and advise players on how best to avoid high-risk, in-game situations.
Harnessing this kind of feedback has enabled Riddell to gain territory in its pursuit of greater protection for the wearers of its helmets, but it was concurrent developments on the West Coast that paved the way for the next few strides forward. Carbon approached Riddell off the back of its work with Adidas, additively manufacturing the midsoles of the Futurecraft 4D trainers, believing it could attribute its know-how around achieving the desired responses in certain areas of a latticed component to Riddell’s helmet liners.
Carbon L1s Lab
“The two programmes are a little different because for Adidas you’re looking for energy return, and in this case, you’re looking for energy damping,” explained Erika Berg, Carbon’s Head of Application Development. “For that, we use different materials, from the same family, the EPU, but slightly differently tuned for different results.”
Sample parts in this customised elastomer were put through compression tests, tensile tests, and impact tests by Riddell and, with some tweaks in the lattice structure, were judged to outperform its current foam. It’s the structuring of the lattices that really sets the liners apart from the originals. There are seven liner pads in total – down from 20 by the way – and within each, the lattice is fine-tuned to provide tough areas to provide a stiff response and soft areas to dissipate rotational forces, acceleration, and velocity. Together, the seven pads comprise around 140,000 struts. The subtleties of their design dictate the performance.
“They can vary in thickness, in length, and then the shape, and the cell size of that shape,” Berg said. “Those are some of the parameters that we use to fine tune the response that you get. We can also change the direction of the lattice, so that could help with things like printability, but also response. If we know that there is one location that is receiving a direct response we want to make sure to attenuate that impact in a compression stance, but other areas we know have significant relationships with rotational forces and so we may change the direction of the lattice to make sure that we get more of a sheer result from that. We’re [also] trying to consider different areas that may improve rotational forces by improving the softness or changing the cell type in the way that the sheer stresses affect everything.”
Lattice Precision Diamond liner pad printed with Carbon's Digital Light Synthesis technology
The seven pads are produced on Carbon’s L1 Digital Light Synthesis platform, all in a single build. They are then passed through a quality control process, testing locations throughout each pad to ensure the response and performance is right. Then, they’re placed, attached with Velcro, into the shell. Riddell and Carbon can go from scan to delivery of the helmet in less than a day. At the beginning of this project, they went from files to field, with thousands of cloud-based iterations developed, in just six months, and by November 2018, at least one player at the 32 NFL teams was wearing a customised Precision Diamond helmet with printed liners. The partners commercially launched the product at Superbowl LIII three months later and have been taking orders through the summer. Going forward, the helmet is to be made available to college footballers, and the customised material that Carbon has developed for this project will be rolled out too.
Riddell’s latest headwear product iteration comes amidst intense discussion around the side-effects of one of the world’s most lucrative sports. The driving factor was to ‘provide a superior product, the best protection to players’, per Berg, while Riddell has been ‘laser focused on head protection for years, decades even,’ and has sought to take advantage of the pace of technological innovation to address growing concerns for player safety.
As the players cross the white line and enter the fray, with thousands in the immediate vicinity and millions watching at home, the Precision Diamond helmet is among the 2019/20 season’s emerging stars. It’s waited patiently these last few months, had its fit tested and performance scrutinised, and is now set to have its impact. For some, it felt like years.
“You’ve got a whole design team and engineering team that has been waiting to be able to design and manufacture a 3D printed helmet for quite some time, for more than a decade,” finished Vittori Bologna, Research & Development Manager at Riddell. “Now, the technology has caught up to where our visions were.”
