CLEVELAND, Ohio — Sunday's Super Bowl will be the last chance this season to see those brain-rattling hits that NFL fans love and doctors increasingly worry about.

But the bashing will continue – with mechanical stand-ins, not real players – inside a new lab jointly run by Northeast Ohio's two medical research powerhouses.

The Cleveland Traumatic Neuromechanics Consortium, operated by the Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve University, pairs the typically competitive institutions in an effort to better understand the forces that cause head, brain, neck and spinal injuries, and to devise improved protective gear, treatments and prevention strategies.

The consortium, one of a handful in the country focusing on sports- and battlefield-related brain injuries, will tap CWRU's and the Clinic's deep expertise in medical research, engineering, materials science, brain studies, imaging tools and patient care. It will also draw on the region's passion for sports and its wealth of pro and amateur athletic teams.

"That equation's pretty simple: One plus one equals three," Adam Bartsch said of the partnership. Bartsch, a CWRU-trained mechanical engineer and head of the Clinic's Head, Neck and Spine Research Laboratory, will co-direct the consortium with CWRU mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Vikas Prakash, who studies impact mechanics and has worked with the U.S. military to improve body and vehicle armor.

There's a stark need for brain injury care and prevention. Nearly 4 million concussions annually result from athletic activities, the Centers for Disease Control reports. Among U.S. troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan during the last decade, at least 320,000 suffered probable, though often untreated, concussions, and many have lasting problems, according to a Rand Corp. study.

There's growing evidence that people who have multiple concussions, or even repeated head blows that don't rise to the level of a concussion, may end up with permanent brain damage.

A single concussion may itself be the cumulative result of head hits over time, according to a provocative Purdue University study of high school football players published this week. The Purdue researchers found evidence of brain activity changes in players who had repeated head blows during the season but who didn't have concussion symptoms.

Identifying the threshold for temporary or permanent brain damage – how many impacts, and of what magnitude – is one of the top priorities in head injury research, and one of the problems the new lab will tackle.

Earlier this week, Prakash and Bartsch uncrated a piece of equipment that should help provide some answers. It's a car-sized device called a linear impacter, an air-powered ram that slams a rod into a heavily-instrumented replica of a human head to mimic a football impact.

The impacter, used to test football helmets, is part of a $250,000 gift to the CTNC by Rawlings Sporting Goods. Later, the engineers plan to augment the lab with a ballistic air gun that simulates the shock-wave effects of a roadside bomb, to study blast-impact brain injuries. They'll also add high-speed cameras to capture split-second details.

The linear impacter delivers a straight-line punch, but one of the first things the CTNC engineers will do is modify it to also deal an oblique, head-spinning blow, like the concussion-causing hit from Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker James Harrison that abruptly ended Browns quarterback Colt McCoy's season in early December.

Scientists think such complex, off-center impacts and the sudden rotational acceleration they apply to the brain, slinging it like a lump of dough in a blender, may cause more damage than a straight-line hit.

Developing ultra-keen sensors for the test dummies' heads and computer models that simulate how the brain reacts to sudden acceleration and strain should help the CTNC researchers better understand what precipitates a concussion.

Knowing those critical conditions, in turn, could lead to better athletic and military helmets and other protective gear, improved safety standards, and perhaps provide the basis for sports rule-changes to further limit head-to-head contact.

"There are things that can be done to the helmet that would be helpful in basically absorbing energy and protecting the head," Prakash said. "Engineering-wise, it's very rich."

Some examples:

• A slippery coating so blows slide off, reducing the duration and force of impact.

• Helmet layers made of feather-light, energy-absorbing carbon nanotubes, and helmet padding made of fluid-filled, channeled bladders that disperse and blunt a hit.

• Helmets that sturdy enough to safeguard the head, but that break or crack after absorbing a critical impact. That would force an athlete to leave the field and get attention rather than staying in the game, and might also discourage "spearing"-style tackling that leads with the helmet.

"Maybe there's something that could be a little more protective [but] people don't think they're invincible when they wear it," Bartsch said.

Whatever technology the consortium develops could be licensed to commercial manufacturers for production, the two engineers said. They'll seek money for the lab's research from government grants, organizations such as the Defense Department and the National Football League, foundations and private donors.

In the realm of brain injuries, "there are many more questions than answers," Bartsch said. "As engineers, we're able to solve a lot of different problems in a lot of different areas." And with the proximity of the Clinic's and CWRU's workforces, "we can drive 15 minutes to collaborate."