Elemance, LLC — Department of Defense STTR Phase I: N22A-T017

Description

The modern United States Warfighter is equipped for combat with a sophisticated suite of personal protective equipment (PPE). Recent advances in material science and manufacturing have led to significant gains in the performance of PPE. However, the complexity of modern PPE and the variety of design criteria, certification requirements, and performance considerations requires a labor intensive and experimentally demanding design process. Adding to these difficulties are the lack of suitable and easily accessible human surrogates for translating the performance of PPE in testing to prediction of real-world performance for military personnel in theater. Digital engineering tools are poised to fill gaps in the current PPE design process and facilitate both expedited and more comprehensive design analyses. One key tool available in the digital design space to serve this purpose is the computational Finite Element (FE) Human Body Model (HBM). By leveraging detailed geometries of human anatomy and advanced material models, HBMs allow researchers to investigate the performance of equipment and devices at the human interface by directly predicting the human response at the global and tissue levels, providing a level of interrogation not possible in empirical testing. Another key digital engineering tool is probabilistic methodologies to facilitate uncertainty quantification and optimization. With current experimental processes for PPE design, quantities of interest (i.e. injury) are restricted to the response of single, or few test specimens. This can make it difficult and/or erroneous to quantify the true effect of design changes, as very subtle differences in human anatomy can accrete to a substantial change in PPE performance. Only by systematically accounting for natural anatomical variation and uncertainty can these design changes be properly quantified and interpreted. No stand-alone, user-friendly framework currently exists to allow engineers and designers to rapidly investigate the performance of new PPE designs and ideas. By leveraging HBMs and their injury prediction capabilities, the door is opened for the design and optimization of PPE to be truly “human-centered”. Design criteria, such as the deformation depth of clay, can be replaced by human-centered injury metrics. Therefore, the overarching objective of this program is to develop a digital design tool capable of rapid design exploration of PPE that couples a state-of-the-art family of HBMs with advanced probabilistic and optimization techniques. PPE design exploration through HBMs and Generation of User-Adapted Armor Rapid Design Software (GUARDS) will provide manufacturers with a much needed tool to both accelerate the PPE design cycle while also making performance more focused on relevant real world injury reduction. This will directly lead to PPE designs that are solely focused on operational suitability.