Contact Burn Injuries: Experimental Assessments of Short Duration Contact Exposures

The quantification of contact burn injury risk is an important part of many product development cycles and hazard assessments for industrial processes. Two well-known standards relied upon for performing these assessments are primarily based on experiments conducted in the 1940s. Partially due to the manner in which these experiments were conducted, the standards implicitly make the assumption that the objects have a semi-infinite reservoir of energy. In this paper, a series of experiments were conducted by taking thermesthesiometer measurements of different materials, having different thicknesses, at different temperatures. In general, the risk of a burn injury occurring shows little dependence on the thickness of the material. In this way, for short term exposures, a surface temperature measurement of the object is likely sufficient to assess the risk of a burn injury occurring. Measurements did confirm, however, that for longer exposures with thinner materials, the severity of the heat exposure decreases, likely due to the energy dissipating from the limited thermal mass of the object.