Browse Topic: Protective systems
The Crashworthy and Escape Systems Branch at NAWCAD has been developing an integrated restraint harness concept for several years, with the intent of developing a novel method of providing improved occupant protection in a crash scenario. A series of tests was conducted on the Horizontal Accelerator at NAS Patuxent River to evaluate the performance of the prototype integrated-restraint system under MIL-STD-58095 conditions with the 50th percentile male Hybrid III Anthropomorphic Test Device (ATD). While occupant flail was the primary metric being analyzed in this effort, ATD instrumentation was also captured, showing that the integrated restraint system demonstrated a significant reduction in head flail compared to five-point restraints while maintaining injury criteria within acceptable levels.
Pilots and crew of rotary-wing aircraft can be exposed to inertial and task position stressors that generate pain. Repeated painful exposures with or without tissue damage are precursors to pain sensitization and chronic pain. Chronic pain leads to reduced operational readiness and long-term medical treatment. This study investigated protection orthosis for unrecoverable effects on the cervical spine by heavy helmets and accessories. A user-customized product has been developed and customization has been intended to be done with multi-body dynamic modeling and testing. Although there are many biomechanical models of the human cervical spine in the literature, their analysis capabilities to perform modal analysis and frequency response analysis are limited. Especially for Rotary-wing applications, models with such capabilities will play an essential role in diagnosing and rehabilitating musculoskeletal disorders and designing engineering devices to prevent and heal cervical spine
The AW609 tiltrotor features a unique high-mounted wing with rotatable nacelles positioned at the wing tips, it is capable of operating both in airplane and vertical flight mode. To achieve suited protection of the occupants during emergency landing, the wing - which is particularly stiff in order to sustain the heavy weights at the tips, where rotors, engines and transmissions are positioned - implements a controlled failure mechanism at root, so that during emergency landings it breaks and unloads the fuselage of the weight of wingbox and nacelles, thus avoiding catastrophic collapse. As the effectiveness of such mechanism was never demonstrated under impact conditions, certification agencies requested an empirical validation through experimental testing. The test was carried out July 2022 at Polytechnic of Milan, Italy; the present work details the Test activity, from its preliminary phases to the Test Day, to the analyses of its outcomes.
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