Base Protection (Italy)

Abstract Toe caps are fundamental components of safety footwear used to prevent injuries which can be caused by falling objects. They can be realized by exploiting different materials (metal, composites and plastics) and manufacturing processes (stamping, injection molding, compression molding, etc.). However, they have always to fulfill the stringent requirements of safety regulations. In addition, in order to guarantee an ergonomic use, they must be as light as possible. It is estimated that at least 300 million pairs of safety footwear, with 600 million of toe caps, end up in landfill or are incinerated every year. This huge amount of wastes generates a relevant environmental impact, mainly attributable to toe caps manufacturing. In this context, it is important to develop new solutions which minimize the environmental impacts of toe caps manufacturing. Among others, the reuse of carbon fiber prepreg scraps has been recognized as a valid method to produce effective toe caps. In this paper, a detailed analysis of the environmental impacts associated to toe caps realized with reclaimed prepreg scraps has been conducted exploiting the Life Cycle Assessment methodology. The results have been compared to those obtained by analyzing toe caps realized in steel, aluminum, polycarbonate and glass fiber composite. Results demonstrate that the reclaim process for carbon fiber prepreg scraps can be a valid circular economy model to produce more sustainable toe caps for safety footwear.

Ramjet propulsion for gun-launched projectiles has received substantial attention since the invention of the ramjet engine concept in 1913. After the second World War, projectiles using solid-fuel were gaining interest due to their inherent simplicity and robustness. Throughout the world, research and development programs have been and still are being executed on the topic of solid fuel ramjet projectiles. This paper intends to give an overview of the worldwide activities in this field. To this end an extensive literature review is executed which gives a clear view on the activities performed over the years by the research institutes and companies of the different countries. The paper is concluded by a summary of the main achievements of all the work on solid fuel ramjet projectiles as well as of the remaining challenges. In addition, an outlook of this technology field into the future is given by indicating some opportunities that may be within reach with the present state-of-the-art of the solid fuel ramjet projectile technology.

This chapter will provide a brief history of the US DoD’s efforts to establish a capability to repatriate chemically contaminated human remains. It will address current doctrine and gaps and explain current research studies conducted by the US DoD to determine the residual toxic hazards and postmortem risks of chemically contaminated remains. Implications of the study results on operational concepts and procedures will be addressed, and recommendations for future studies will be suggested.

In steel manufacturing, the conventional method to determine the mechanical properties and microstructure is by offline, destructive (lab-)characterisation of sample material that is typically taken from the head or the tail of the coil. Since coils can be up to 7 km long, the samples are not always representative for the main coil body. Also, the time delay (typically a few days) between the actual production and the availability of the characterisation results implies that these results cannot be exploited for real-time adaptation of the process settings.

Procedural content generation is becoming more and more relevant to solve the problem of content creation for the ever growing virtual worlds of games, simulations and other applications. However, these procedures are often unintuitive or use vague parameters, making it somewhat difficult for a designer to express his or her creative intent. Even worse, most of these techniques lack an accessible and easy to use interface.We have developed a generic layout solving approach to automatically create sensible content for virtual worlds. In that context, this paper proposes a high-level scene description language that allows designers to specify particular types of scenes. This description language allows designers to easily specify which objects need to be present in a scene, their attributes, and possible interrelationships. Application of the language, based on the rich vocabulary taken from a semantic library, is illustrated with several examples, showing its flexibility, intuitiveness and ease of use.

Generally, motion simulators present motion and visual cues different from each other due to the physical limitations of the motion platform. Nonetheless, high fidelity motion platforms are capable of simulating some maneuvers one-to-one, i.e., motion cues equal to visual cues. However, one-to-one simulation is normally not preferred by subjects and the simulator motion is reported as too strong. In this study we investigated whether this overestimation depends on the frequency and amplitude of inertial motion. The stimuli in this study consisted of translations in the lateral direction. The Desdemona research simulator was used to generate the motion profiles. Six sinusoidal profiles with different combinations of amplitude and frequency were used as reference stimuli. For every experimental condition, the visual and inertial information had equal frequency but different amplitude. Subjects had to change the inertial motion amplitude until they obtained the best relation between the two sources of motion information. Our results showed that stimuli with high amplitude were associated with smaller motion gains than stimuli with lower amplitude. The same occurred for stimuli with higher frequency when compared to stimuli with lower frequency. The findings in this study suggest that a dynamic scaling algorithm for inertial motion could improve the perceived realism of motion simulation.

Following a previous study in the Simona simulator on perception of coherent visual and inertial cues in a flight simulator, an experiment is performed in the Desdemona simulator to investigate the influence of the frequency of visual and inertial stimuli on the limits of the perceived coherence zone. The coherence zone is defined as the range of inertial motion amplitudes that, though not being a physical match to the visual cues, are still perceived by subjects as coherent. The main hypothesis tested is that the semi-circular canals dynamics influence the internal comparison between the visually and inertially perceived self-velocity. Furthermore, the results between the Simona and Desdemona studies are compared. In general, the effect of amplitude and frequency on the measured coherence zones follow the same trends as in the previous study: the coherence zone width increases with increasing visual cue amplitude and the point of mean coherence decreases with respect to the one-to-one line for the higher amplitudes. The results for the low frequency and low amplitude stimulus might be affected by the inertial sensory threshold, making it difficult to draw definite conclusions about the posed hypothesis. The results between the two simulator studies are different in terms of absolute values, but the trends are the same.

Design of game worlds is becoming more and more labor-intensive because of the increasing demand and complexity of content. This is being partially addressed by developing semi-automated procedural techniques that help generate (parts of) game worlds (e.g terrains, cities and buildings). However, most level editors rather deficiently capture and deploy designer's intent. For example, common positional or functional relationships between objects are usually limited to pre-processing a number of anticipated cases. In this paper we propose a novel scheme for specifying high-level semantics of objects within a game virtual world, and in particular we illustrate its application to a variety of layout solving problems raised by procedural generation methods. Our approach combines the genericity of a semantic class library with the power of a layout solver, and it shows to be both very flexible and effective. Moreover, this scheme can be useful for improving both manual, automated and mixed modeling techniques, always leading to a more efficient layouting process for game worlds. We conclude that by allowing designers to capture more of their intent and real-life knowledge in the objects with which they populate a game world, the integration of semantics will strongly contribute to stimulate content reusability, enrich the game play, and eventually also significantly cut down design duration and cost.

Robust programming, and more specific LMI techniques, have proven to be an extremely effective tool for the synthesis of missile guidance laws. The advantage of this model-based approach is that a large class of uncertainties can be taken into account and a robust guidance law is obtained. In this paper the class of uncertainties applicable for robust design is extended to include non-linear dynamics. Hence the obtained robust disturbance feedback strategies provide an upper bound on the performance of the nonlinear system against all allowable evader disturbances and model uncertainties. Furthermore it is shown that implementing the strategies as a receeding horizon control strategy lead to very satisfactory results. Copyright © 2009 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc. All rights reserved.

In this study, we describe how to use innovative techniques to improve the decision-making process in crisis response organizations. The focus was on building situation awareness of a crisis and overcoming pitfalls such as tunnel vision and information bias through using critical thinking. We started by observing typical difficulties in crisis management in a field study. The essential elements of concern were a deficit in sharing and communicating understanding and a patchy overview of the topics communicated, within as well as between teams. Communication frequently did not entail the reasoning behind a decision that was made. We therefore developed a critical thinking tool that made the reasoning process more explicit and at the same time more robust by tying it to specific hypotheses. We studied a candidate support tool in a controlled setting and found that people made better judgments, particularly in situations where they would be prone to decision biases. We subsequently extended the critical thinking tool to a team setting. We list a number of requirements that are essential for support systems that intend to limit tunnel vision and alleviate communication and coordination problems in crisis response organizations.