| In many circumstances, clothing adversely impacts human performance while also providing protection from exposure to a wide spectrum of external hazards. For a successful design of protective clothing systems, two competing factors, i.e. maximizing the protection that it provides while minimizing the negative impact that it has on performance, have to be balanced. However, due to the lack of understanding on the complex nature of clothing-wearer interactions and the limitation of available tools and approaches, the design task has always been a challenge. In this study, the mechanical aspect of the clothing-wearer interaction is investigated. The objective is to realistically describe clothing with computational models and to then exercise these models to realistically predict their impact on wearers' performance for given tasks. With a knowledge of how clothing impacts human performance, the clothing can be re-designed to improve performance.; Computational solid mechanics approaches are adopted here. A mathematical clothing modeling framework is developed and the contact tractions that clothing exerts on a wearer for prescribed motions are determined. Based on these tractions, other physical quantities are derived to quantify the clothing's impact. The clothing modeling framework includes four components: (1) a macroscale clothing/fabric model, which represents highly flexible fabrics; (2) a mesoscale fabric/material model, which captures the complex material properties of woven fabrics; (3) a contact computation and collision detection module, which identifies potential collision and enforces appropriate contact constraints; and (4) a digital human model, which provides the definition of the wearer's body surface and kinematics description.; In constructing the framework, many challenging issues are identified and explored, such as robust computational models for highly flexible and unstable systems, contact computation techniques, efficient collision detection algorithms, and constitutive modeling of complex fabric properties. Each of these issues still remains its own challenge and the solution adopted may require improvement. However, the novel framework presented in this work provides a construct to incorporate these individual components and has been proved effective in studying the mechanical interactions between clothing and wearers. |
