Development and Preliminary Validation of a 50th Percentile Pedestrian Finite Element Model

Pedestrians represent one of the most vulnerable road users and comprise nearly 22% of the road crash related fatalities in the world. Therefore, protection of pedestrians in the car-to-pedestrian collisions (CPC) has recently generated increased attention with regulations which involve three subsystem tests for adult pedestrian protection (leg, thigh and head impact tests). The development of a finite element (FE) pedestrian model could be a better alternative that characterizes the whole-body response of vehicle–pedestrian interactions and assesses the pedestrian injuries. The main goal of this study was to develop and to preliminarily validate a FE model corresponding to a 50th male pedestrian in standing posture. The FE model mesh and defined material properties are based on the Global Human Body Modeling (GHBMC) 50th percentile male occupant model. The lower limb-pelvis and lumbar spine regions of the human model were preliminarily validated against the post mortem human surrogate (PMHS) test data recorded in four-point lateral knee bending tests, pelvic impact tests, and lumbar spine bending tests. Then, pedestrian-to-vehicle impact simulations were performed using the whole pedestrian model and the results were compared to corresponding pedestrian PMHS tests. Overall, the preliminary simulation results showed that lower leg response is close to the upper boundaries of PMHS corridors. The pedestrian kinematics predicted by the model was also in the overall range of test data obtained with PMHS with various anthropometries. In addition, the model shows capability to predict the most common injuries observed in pedestrian accidents. Generally, the validated pedestrian model may be used by safety researchers in the design of front ends of new vehicles in order to increase pedestrian protection.

A Review of Anti-Lock Braking System Configuration for Two-Wheeled Vehicle

Anti-Lock Braking Systems (ABS) have been developed and integrated into vehicles since it is invented more than thirty years ago. However, most of nowadays ABS are designed for multi-wheeled passenger cars, commercial cars and trucks. Due to the technical complexity and additional cost, ABS is not as common on two-wheeled vehicles, such as motorcycle, electric scooter, electric bike, etc. Study shows that injuries and deaths in relation to two-wheeled vehicles with ABS are significantly decreased. This paper is to provide a brief review of the state-of-the-art on the ABS configuration of two-wheeled vehicles.

A Detailed Five-Year Review of Medical Device Additive Manufacturing Research and its Potential for Translation to Clinical Practice

This paper provides a systematic review of over 350 publications that document specific medical device examples in which the design and manufacturing relied on additive manufacturing processes (more popularly referred to as “3d Printing”). Existing reviews on 3d printing for medical device design focus on the range of clinical applications and potential uses for this technology. However, existing work tends to omit key medical device development and regulatory requirements pertaining to the use of 3d printing for technology translation. These omissions often present a skewed view of each device’s potential for rapid translation to commercialization and common clinical practice. To fill gaps in existing literature, this review includes medical device journal articles and identifies each article’s country of origin, the product development stage in which 3d printing was used, and the device’s specific type and classification under the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The findings from this systematic review provide a detailed international snapshot of current additive manufacturing research and its near term potential for changing clinical practice.

A Medical Device for Patellofemoral Disorders: Design and Development

Patellofemoral disorders have been recognized as one of the major causes of the human knee articulation problems. In general, the current available methods to assess patellofemoral joint disorders include the analysis of clinical history, clinical tests and imaging exams. These approaches are ambiguous in the diagnosis produced since they strongly depend on the expertise of the examinant. With the purpose to assist in the diagnosis process of the patellofemoral disorders, a new medical device is proposed throughout this work. In the sequel of this process, the identification and full characterization of the main issues associated with patellofemoral joint are presented. The main features and the engineered solution are accuracy and reproducibility, possibility of incorporation into imaging equipment, adaptability to a large range of knee sizes, easy and cheap to manufacture and anatomically and ergonomically fashion. The mechanical system designed and built allows for the measurement and quantification of the most significant patellofemoral joint motions, more precisely the medial-lateral translation, internal-external tilt and internal-external rotation. The validation of the medical device is investigated here by analyzing the data produced from actual clinical exams, being the early results quite satisfactory and very promising for extensive use in helping in the diagnosis of the patellofemoral disorders.

Fostering Diverse Analogical Transfer in Bio-Inspired Design

Nature is a powerful resource for engineering designers. The natural world provides numerous cases for analogy and inspiration in engineering design. Transferring the valuable knowledge and inspiration gained from the biology domain to the engineering domain during concept generation is a somewhat disorganized process and relies heavily on the designers’ insight and background knowledge of many fields to make the necessary leaps between the domains. Furthermore, the novice designer approaching biology for inspiration tends to focus heavily on copying the visual attributes of a biological system to develop a solution that looks like the biological system rather than explore at deeper levels to uncover relationships that lead to the development of true analogies. There are now well-known methods for teaching bioinspired design in engineering and the majority of methods prescribe the use of analogies in order to facilitate knowledge transfer, however, guidance in analogy formulation to foster the creative leaps is missing or ill defined. Thus little is known about how students use biological systems for design inspiration. This paper proposes categories for analogical knowledge transfer in bio-inspired design to foster and characterize diverse analogical knowledge transfer. The proposed analogy categories are used to describe the behavior seen in an engineering class. Results indicate that (1) single biological system provides multiple analogies that result in different engineering inspiration for design; (2) biological information from multiple categories is transferred during concept generation; and (3) non-physical characteristics may inspire more sophisticated engineering inspiration than those based on physical characteristics alone. Overall, the analogy data classification has resulted in a better understanding of analogical knowledge transfer during bio-inspired design and leads to best practices for teaching bio-inspired design to engineering students.

Anti-Lock Wheel Slip Control With an Adaptive Searching Algorithm for the Optimal Slip

An adaptive searching algorithm for the optimal slip during ABS wheel slip control is proposed. By taking advantage of the fluctuation of wheel slip control, the direction towards the optimal slip can be found, and the target slip calculated by the algorithm asymptotically converged to the optimal slip, which is proved using the Lyapunov theory. A gain-scheduling wheel slip controller is developed to control the wheel slip to the target slip. Simulations on the uniform road and on the road with changed friction are carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Simulation results show that the ABS algorithm using the proposed searching algorithm can make full use of the road friction and adapts to road friction changes. Comparing with the conventional rule-based ABS, the pressure modulation amplitude and wheel speed fluctuation is significantly reduced, improving control performance of ABS.

Adaptation of Rehabilitation System Based on User’s Mental Engagement

Recognition of user’s mental engagement is imperative to the success of robotic rehabilitation. The paper explores the novel paradigm in robotic rehabilitation of using Passive BCI as opposed to the conventional Active ones. We have designed experiments to determine a user’s level of mental engagement. In our experimental study, we record the brain activity of 3 healthy subjects during multiple sessions where subjects need to navigate through a maze using a haptic system with variable resistance/assistance. Using the data obtained through the experiments we highlight the drawbacks of using conventional workload metrics as indicators of human engagement, thus asserting that Motor and Cognitive Workloads be differentiated. Additionally we propose a new set of features: differential PSD of Cz-Poz at alpha, Beta and Sigma band, (Mental engagement) and relative C3-C4 at beta (Motor Workload) to distinguish Normal Cases from those instances when haptic where applied with an accuracy of 92.93%. Mental engagement is calculated using the power spectral density of the Theta band (4–7 Hz) in the parietal-midline (Pz) with respect to the central midline (Cz). The above information can be used to adjust robotic rehabilitation parameters I accordance with the user’s needs. The adjustment may be in the force levels, difficulty level of the task or increasing the speed of the task.

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Problem Formulation and Ideation Skills Learned Throughout an Engineering Design Course

Conventional syllabi of engineering design courses either do not pay enough attention to conceptual design skills, or they lack an objective assessment of those skills to show students’ progress. During a semester-long course of advanced engineering product design, we assigned three major design projects to twenty five students. For each project we asked them to formulate the problems in the Problem Formulator web-based testbed. In addition, we collected sketches for all three design problems, feasibility analyses for the last two, and a working prototype for the final project. We report the students’ problem formulation and ideation in terms of a set of nine problem formulation characteristics and ASU’s ideation effectiveness metrics respectively. We discuss the limitations that the choice of the design problems caused, and how the progress of a class of students during a semester-long design course resulted in a convergence in sets of metrics that we have defined to characterize problem formulation and ideation. We also review the results of students of a similar course which we reported last year in order to find common trends.

An Automatic System for Analyzing Phantom Images to Determine the Reliability of PET/SPECT Cameras

This paper describes an automatic system for analyzing phantom images from two types of PET/CT scanners. The system was developed for the purpose of obtaining tomographic image quality parameters, which determine a number of different performance parameters, primarily scanner sensitivity, tomographic uniformity, contrast and spatial resolution. The system provides a method for generating and altering image masks used for the analysis of PET images, which are then automatically aligned with the PET data. The system automatically generates Quality Control (QC) reports and is currently being used at clinical PET/CT center.

FEA Tire Modeling and Validation Techniques

Recent advances in power and efficiency of computerized modeling methods has made it easier to develop accurate tire models. These newer models are now created with such accuracy that it has become easy to predict the experimental tire’s behavior and characteristics. These models are helpful with determining tire, tire-road, and tire-soil interaction properties. By creating virtual models, the overall capital for research and development can be reduced as well as replacing unavailable experimental tires for research. This research paper mainly focuses on the validation of computer generated FEA tire models which are then used for the prediction of the experimental tire’s rolling resistance, static and dynamic characteristics. Experimental data, such as rolling resistance and vertical acceleration are used in validation simulations in order to tune the virtual model to match the experimental tire’s behavior. The tire that was used for this research is a six-groove 445/50R22.5 FEA truck tire, which was constructed and validated over the course of this research.