• Fashion & Textile Research Journal
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.569-582
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• 2018

The purpose of this study is to verify the impact protection performance and to evaluate the activity, design, fit, and pad characteristics of the fall impact protection clothing for elderly women. The protective clothing was designed as pants type and underwear type, and an impact protection pad in the form of a tightly connected regular hexagon piece was inserted in the hip and hip joints. The pad was made of two kinds of foam single pad and foam and gel combination pad so that they could be inserted into pants type and underwear type, respectively. The results of the shock absorption performance of the fall impact protective clothing showed that when the impact force of 4601N was applied to the pants type protective clothing, the impact force was reduced by 29% in the foam pad type and 26% in the gel and foam pad type. When the force of 5113N was applied to the underwear type, it decreased by 40% in the foam pad type and by 34% in the gel and foam pad type. As a result of wearing evaluation of subject group, it was found that fit and activity of underwear type was better than that of pants type. Foam pad type was evaluated to be lighter than gel and foam pad type in both the subject and the expert group and the gel and foam pad was evaluated to be more flexible in the expert group.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Manufacturing Technology Engineers
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.639-643
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• 2012

The hip protector has been developed using the air-bag which has the capability of attenuating an impact. The impact force using the PVC air-bag was decreased by values of 27.5% on average, compared to the impact force without the air-bag. In the experiment, the standard deviation of the impact force attenuation rate was 0.78%. It means that the dimensions of the air-bag have no significant effects to reduce the impact. We believe that it is possible to design light and cheap hip protectors with air-bag to prevent the femur fracture.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
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• v.41 no.5
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• pp.939-949
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• 2017

This study uses 3D printing technology to design and fabricate a fall impact protection pad with a spacer fabric structure. The design of the pads consists of hexagonal three-dimensional units connected in a honey-comb shape; in addition, the unit consists of a surface layer and a spacer layer. Protect pads were designed as either a hexagonal type or diamond type according to the surface layer structure; subsequently, a spacer filament was also designed as the most basic I-shape type. Designed pads were printed using four types of flexible filaments to select suitable material for a fall impact protection pad. Impact protection performance and bending stiffness were evaluated for the eight type of pad outputs. As a result of the impact protection performance evaluation, when the force of 6,500N was applied, the force passed through the pad was in the range of 1,370-2,132N. FlexSolid$^{(R)}$ and Skinflex$^{TM}$ showed good protection performance and cubicon flexible filament showed the lowest protection. NinjaFlex$^{(R)}$ was found to be the most flexible in the bending stiffness evaluation.

• Journal of Aerospace System Engineering
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.28-39
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• 2022

With the development of small multicopter PAV (Personal Air Vehicle), it is necessary to develop safety-related devices for manned rotorcraft. In this study, we assumed that an external airbag can be installed in a small multicopter PAV, and using LS-DYNA's Airbag Folding Application, we performed a free-fall collision analysis by modeling the airbag shapes consisting or Roll, Zigzag, and Sigma. There was no significant difference in the final airbag deployment time of the three models. However, when it collides with the ground during deployment, the Sigma fold type external airbag had the fastest deployment speed, applying the most impact force to the PAV, while the Roll fold type external airbag applied the smallest impact force to the PAV.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.597-602
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• 2021

Even in the era of the 4th industrial revolution, the prevention of industrial accidents is still an important issue in industrial sites. In solving the problem of industrial safety, a product can be difficult to market if there is a lack of standard or method for a reliable performance evaluation. The purpose of this study was to develop and evaluate a test method for a wearable airbag product for protecting the body from falls that was newly developed to respond to fall accidents in industrial sites. As a research method, reliable evaluation standards were developed and applied through four stages of the evaluation and development process (Step 1: Product review, Step 2: Data research, Step 3: Expert meeting, Step 4: Drawing evaluation standard). In addition, the impact force was evaluated according to the developed evaluation standard. The fall impact force obtained through the evaluation showed a reduction effect of approximately 96% compared to the existing impact force. Therefore, the fall impact force was reduced significantly when the airbag was applied. This will enable new convergence products to be launched on the market and produce an environment where industrial workers can work safely.

• Physical Therapy Korea
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.84-91
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• 2021

Background: A hip fracture may occur spontaneously prior to the hip impact, due to the muscle pulling force exceeding the strength of the femur. Objects: We conducted falling experiments with humans to measure the activity of the hip muscles, and to examine how this was affected by the fall type. Methods: Eighteen individuals fell and landed sideways on a mat, by mimicking video-captured real-life older adults' falls. Falling trials were acquired with three fall directions: forward, backward, or sideways, and with three knee positions at the time of hip impact, where the landing side knee was free of constraint, or contacted the mat or the contralateral knee. During falls, the activities of the iliopsoas (Ilio), gluteus medius (Gmed), gluteus maximus (Gmax) and adductor longus (ADDL) muscles were recorded. Outcome variables included the time to onset, activity at the time of hip impact, and timing of the peak activity with respect to the time of hip impact. Results: For Ilio, Gmed, Gmax, and ADDL, respectively, EMG onset averaged 292, 304, 350, and 248 ms after fall initiation. Timing of the peak activity averaged 106, 96, 84, and 180 ms prior to the hip impact, and activity at the time of hip impact averaged 72.3, 45.2, 64.3, and 63.4% of the peak activity. Furthermore, the outcome variables were associated with fall direction and/or knee position in all but the iliopsoas muscle. Conclusion: Our results provide insights on the hip muscle activation during a fall, which may help to understand the potential injury mechanism of the spontaneous hip fracture.

• Fashion & Textile Research Journal
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.422-428
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• 2018

In this study, we developed honeycomb pads using foam and polymer gel and verified the impact protection performance of pads for the development of a fall protection pants for elderly women aged 65 and over who have a high risk of fracture due to falls. The results are as follows; In the first experiment, the impact protection performance was evaluated for four honeycomb pad samples (CR foam, EPDM foam, hardness 15 polymer gel, and hardness 30 polymer gel) manufactured to a thickness of 5 mm using a single material. When the force of about 10757N was applied to the specimens, all four pads reduced the impact force to 3100N or less. Polymer gels showed better protection than foam materials. In the second experiment, the thickness of the protective pad was set to 8 mm in order to improve the shock absorbing performance of the protective pad. As a result of evaluating the impact protection performance of the foam single pad and foam gel composite pad, the impact absorbing performance of the foam single pad was better. Finally, four kinds of protection pads were made by assigning the foam single pad and the foam gel composite pad to pants type and underwear type respectively. The pad thickness of the main protection area was set to 8 mm to enhance the protection, and gradually decreased to 5mm and 3mm toward the edge to improve the appearance and fit.

• Journal of Advanced Research in Ocean Engineering
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.146-162
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• 2018

The unsteady problem of a rigid body impact onto a floating plate is studied. Both the plate and the water are at rest before impact. The plate motion is caused by the impact force transmitted to the plate through an elastic layer with viscous damping on the top of the plate. The hydrodynamic force is calculated by using the second-order model of plate impact by Iafrati and Korobkin (2011). The present study is concerned with the deceleration experienced by a rigid body during its collision with a floating object. The problem is studied also by a fully-nonlinear computational-fluid-dynamics method. The elastic layer is treated with a moving body-fitted grid, the impacting body with an immersed boundary method, and a discrete-element method is used for the contact-force model. The presence of the elastic layer between the impacting bod- ies may lead to multiple bouncing of them, if the bodies are relatively light, before their interaction is settled and they continue to penetrate together into the water. The present study is motivated by ship slamming in icy waters, and by the effect of ice conditions on conventional free-fall lifeboats.

• Journal of Ship and Ocean Technology
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.21-27
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• 2000

The slamming force occurring in the free fall impact of cylindrical bodies on the water surface is analyzed in both compressible and incompressible stages. In the compressible phase the hydrodynamic analysis is carried on by the acoustic approximation, obtaining a closed form expression for the maximum impact force. The incompressible analysis is approached through and unsteady boundary element method to compute the free surface evolution and the slamming force on the body. A similar behavior seems to characterize the maximum slamming force versus a dimensionless mass parameter.

• International Journal of Safety
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.21-26
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• 2011

In 2001, an independent official board was constituted in Japan to investigate aircraft and railway accidents. In the past 10 years, many accidents and serious incidents have been investigated and these official reports were published by the board, on which the author had sat for 9 years as boarding member. In the interim, there were several train disasters which mocked our trust in railways and also many apparent trivial incidents. In recent years, serious incidents, which a door of running rail cars opens suddenly with some trouble, happen 2 or 3 times in a year. For the past 10 years, such incidents have happened 14 times and 13 cases of them were closed by the board mentioned above. In these 13 cases, no one fell off the rail car, so that the death toll was none luckily. In this paper, these 13 serious incidents are picked up among all the reports published by the board and outlined using some tables. Especially, fall accidents of passengers are discussed mainly from the view point of impact force and duration time. Then, the equation of HIC (Head Injury Criteria) and the risk curves in terms of the HIC are dealt with properly.