Designing Engineered Composite Materials for Advanced Personal Body Protective Equipment

EasyChair Preprint 15547

Abstract

Conventional textile-reinforced materials for personal body protective equipment (PBPE) often fail to adequately reduce risk of severe injuries, shocks, jerks, and wounds from external physical forces. In contrast, advanced high-performance synthetic and bio-natural materials offer superior impact strength, resilience, toughness, elasticity, durability, and tensile properties, making them ideal for absorbing, transmitting and dissipating impact kinetic energy and localised impulses over larger surface areas of the human body. Considering this, the current scientific study leverages the exceptional mechanical properties of these materials through an iterative laminate design approach, employing sandwich-structured polymer matrices along with focussing on the enhanced structural properties of complex and biomimetic geometries in the composite material’s microstructures for extraordinary protection and novel results. The design process uses computer-aided engineering (CAE) simulations and finite element analysis (FEA) method for testing the composite material, incorporating non-linear dynamic models with real-world impact conditions. The research ensures material selection, conformability and structural optimisation, while post-simulation data analysis provides critical information and statistical insights for refining the human-centred composite material, while also addressing the practical challenges related to manufacturability and scalability of the final design, essentially proposing a virtually validated, digitally driven, design methodology for improving occupational safety and enhancing user comfort.

Keyphrases: Composite laminate, Gyroid, Honeycomb, Mechanical Dissipation, Microstructure, Shock absorption, advanced materials, finite element analysis, occupational safety, spider silk, technical textiles

@booklet{EasyChair:15547,
  author    = {Ansh Ranjan},
  title     = {Designing Engineered Composite Materials for Advanced Personal Body Protective Equipment},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 15547},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2024}}