Renewable energy is a prominent area of research within the energy sector, and the storage of renewable energy represents an efficient method for its utilization. There are various energy storage ...methods available, among which compressed air energy storage stands out due to its large capacity and cost-effective working medium. While land-based compressed air energy storage power stations have been constructed worldwide, their efficiency remains low. Underwater compressed air energy storage has the potential to significantly enhance efficiency, although no such device currently exists. This paper presents the design of an UWCA-FABESD utilizing five flexible air bags for underwater gas storage and discharge. Additionally, it introduces the working principle of the adiabatic underwater compressed air energy storage system and device. Furthermore, a small-scale physical model with similar functionality was designed and manufactured to simulate the charging process of the air bag in onshore charging and discharging tests as well as posture adjustment and lifting arrangement tests, along with underwater charging and discharging tests. These experiments validated the related functions of the designed underwater compressed air flexible bag energy storage device while proposing methods for its improvement. This research provides a new approach to underwater compressed air energy storage.
The transmission of infectious diseases has been studied by mathematical methods since 1760s, among which SIR model shows its advantage in its epidemiological description of spread mechanisms. Here ...we established a modified SIR model with nonlinear incidence and recovery rates, to understand the influence by any government intervention and hospitalization condition variation in the spread of diseases. By analyzing the existence and stability of the equilibria, we found that the basic reproduction number Formula: see text is not a threshold parameter, and our model undergoes backward bifurcation when there is limited number of hospital beds. When the saturated coefficient a is set to zero, it is discovered that the model undergoes the Saddle-Node bifurcation, Hopf bifurcation, and Bogdanov-Takens bifurcation of codimension 2. The bifurcation diagram can further be drawn near the cusp type of the Bogdanov-Takens bifurcation of codimension 3 by numerical simulation. We also found a critical value of the hospital beds bc at Formula: see text and sufficiently small a, which suggests that the disease can be eliminated at the hospitals where the number of beds is larger than bc. The same dynamic behaviors exist even when a ≠ 0. Therefore, it can be concluded that a sufficient number of the beds is critical to control the epidemic.
Objective: We studied the correlation between airbag deployment and eye injuries using 2 different data sets.
Methods: The registry of the Finnish Road Accident (FRA) Investigation Teams was analyzed ...to study severe head- and eyewear-related injuries. All fatal passenger car or van accidents that occurred during the years 2009-2012 (4 years) were included (n = 734). Cases in which the driver's front airbag was deployed were subjected to analysis (n = 409). To determine the proportion of minor, potentially airbag-related eye injuries, the results were compared to the data for all new eye injury patients (n = 1,151) recorded at the Emergency Clinic of the Helsinki University Eye Hospital (HUEH) during one year, from May 1, 2011, to April 30, 2012.
Results: In the FRA data set, the unbelted drivers showed a significantly higher risk of death (odds ratio OR = 5.89, 95% confidence interval CI, 3.33-10.9, P = 2.6E-12) or of sustaining head injuries (OR = 2.50, 95% CI, 1.59-3.97, P = 3.8E-5). Only 4 of the 1,151 HUEH patients were involved in a passenger car accident. In one of the crashes, the airbag operated, and the belted driver received 2 sutured eye lid wounds and showed conjunctival sugillation. No permanent eye injuries were recorded during the follow-up. The calculated annual airbag-related eye injury incidence was less than 1/1,000,000 people, 4/100,000 accidents, and 4/10,000 injured occupants.
Conclusions: Airbag-related eye injuries occurred very rarely in car accidents in cases where the occupant survived and the restraint system was appropriately used. Spectacle use did not appear to increase the risk of eye injury in restrained occupants.
Minimizing the injury potential of the interactions between deploying airbags and car occupants is the major issue with the design of airbag systems. This concern was identified in 1964 by Carl Clark ...when he presented the results of human volunteer and dummy testing of the "Airstop" system that was being developed for aircraft. The following is a chronological summary of the actions taken by the car manufacturers, airbag suppliers, SAE and ISO task groups, research institutes and universities, and consumer and government groups to address this issue.
Airbag system has so many advantages including small volume, superior cushioning performance and easy to control that it has been widely used in many fields such as heavy cargo airdrop, soft landing ...of spacecraft and so on. In this paper, an optimal design method of the airbag is proposed. First, based on the law of thermodynamics and the deformation assumption of airbag, a mathematical model of airbag landing process is established. The results of the model calculation of the cylindrical airbag is preferably consistent with the results of finite element analysis, which shows that the airbag mathematical model is reasonable and accurate. Second, on the basis of this model, the optimal design method of the airbag without rebound is proposed to solve the problem of rebound which will result in uncontrollable attitude and secondary shock in the landing processes. In this method, the evaluation index of airbag cushioning performance is determined, then the key design parameters which have significant impact on airbag cushioning performance are studied, and the optimization model of airbag under constraint with no rebound is subsequently established and solved. Third, by this method, a cylindrical airbag without rebound is obtained. Compared with the non-optimized one, the maximum impact acceleration of the optimized cylindrical airbag is smaller. Consequently, the effectiveness of the proposed optimal design method is verified.
In this paper a new air-bag prototype suitable for protecting valuable objects mounted on the drone is presented. The paper provides a complimentary study involving both numerical simulations and ...experimental study. The experimental research results are presented for typical air-bag's textile material and were used as a base for the material model calibration process. This model was used for the numerical simulations of the proposed air-bag prototype, which were carried out in the LS-Dyna environment. Based on the outcome of the study, the proposed prototype seems to be a suitable device for preventing the unmanned vehicle equipment from unexpected accidents.
Thoracic side airbags (tSABs) were integrated into the vehicle fleet to attenuate and distribute forces on the occupant's chest and abdomen, dissipate the impact energy, and move the occupant away ...from the intruding structure, all of which reduce the risk of injury. This research piece investigates and evaluates the safety performance of the airbag unit by cross-correlating data from a controlled collision environment with field data.
We focus exclusively on vehicle-vehicle lateral impacts from the NHTSA's Vehicle Crash Test Database and NASS-CDS database, which are replicated in the controlled environment by the (crabbed) barrier impact. Similar collisions with and without seat-embedded tSABs are matched to each other and the injury risks are compared.
Results indicated that dummy-based thoracic injury metrics were significantly lower with tSAB exposure (P <.001). Yet, when the controlled collision environment data were cross-correlated with NASS-CDS collisions, deployment of the tSAB indicated no association with thoracic injury (tho. MAIS 2+ unadjusted relative risk RR = 1.14; 90% confidence interval CI, 0.80-1.62; tho. MAIS 3+ unadjusted RR = 1.12; 90% CI, 0.76-1.65).
The data from the controlled collision environment indicated an unequivocal benefit provided by the thoracic side airbag for the crash dummy; however, the real-world collisions demonstrate that no benefit is provided to the occupant. This has resulted from a noncorrelation between the crash test/dummy-based design taking the abstracting process too far to represent the real-world collision scenario.
Objective: The study aimed to evaluate the protection offered by a center-mounted airbag in far-side impacts using the Test device for Human Occupant Restraint (THOR) anthropometric test device ...(ATD).
Methods: A rigid buck was designed based on a production vehicle. The buck consisted of a rigid seat, center console, dash, and far-side door structure. The center console and dash were covered with paper honeycomb (152 kPa), and the far-side door structure was covered with Ethafoam 220 padding material. The airbag was mounted on the seat, to the right of the occupant. The THOR-M50 ATD was positioned according to the standard seating procedure and restrained using a standard 3-point seat belt with a pretensioner and retractor. The buck was mounted on an acceleration sled in 2 orientations. Four tests at 45° (oblique) and 2 tests at 90° (lateral) orientations were conducted. Tests were performed with and without an airbag at 30 km/h delta-V and 14 g acceleration. The head accelerations, neck forces and moments, thoracic accelerations and forces, pelvis accelerations, anterior superior iliac spine (ASIS) forces and moments, and belt webbing loads were obtained from sensors, and the external kinematics was obtained using an optical motion capture system and high-speed digital cameras.
Results: With the center-mounted airbag, in 90° and 45° tests, reductions were observed for the following parameters: head lateral excursions by 6% and 11%, head vertical excursions by 19% and 26%, and peak head resultant accelerations by 36% and 11%. Other regional accelerations, forces, and moments were also reduced for both impact angles. A reduction in seat belt forces with the airbag was observed in 90° tests.
Conclusion: The center-mounted airbag reduced the ATD excursions and accelerations in the 45° and 90° tests, thus reducing the risk of injury due to contact with the intruding structure. The results of this study may assist in designing countermeasures for vehicles in far-side impact.
Accident emergency calling systems (AECSs) are signaled by the deployment of airbags, which causes them to automatically emit information providing the location of the accident site to a public ...service answering party (PSAP). In some realworld accidents, airbags have failed to deploy. This study clarifies the factors that influence the nondeployment of front airbags in vehicle-vehicle collisions, investigating nondeployment of the driver-side front airbags in sedans and light passenger cars (LPCs) from Japanese accident data. The component rates of deployment for front airbags tend to be higher than those of nondeployment at higher values of pseudo-ΔV in vehicle-vehicle frontal impacts. For both sedans and LPCs, the transition zones between nondeployment and deployment of the front airbag occur at pseudo-ΔV values of 30-50 km/h (ΔV ≈ 21-35 km/h). For mutual impact locations where sedans and LPCs impact opponent vehicles at pseudo-ΔV ≥ 40 km/h (ΔV ≈ 28 km/h) in frontal impacts, the component rate of front airbag nondeployment is higher than that of deployment in right-to-right impacts. The results indicate that factors influencing front airbag nondeployment in vehicle-vehicle collisions are ΔV, impact offset configuration, and crossing angle. Considering front airbag nondeployment in real-world accidents, AECSs should have other functions, such as a manual button, to emit information in addition to automatic emission via airbag signaling.
Objective: Recent changes in FMVSS have led to the utilization of side air curtains to provide occupant retention during rollover events. However, the safety advantage provided by the air curtains ...relies on the vehicle system's ability to detect the rollover event and deploy the curtains. The purpose of this study is to identify crash and vehicle characteristics in motor vehicle rollovers that influence side air curtain deployment and occupant outcomes. The current study aims to improve the understanding of rollover events and inspire more robust air curtain deployment strategies.
Methods: Study data were extracted from rollover cases documented in the NASS-CDS data set from 2011 to 2015. Vehicle model years of 2011 or later with side air curtains installed were examined. The presence of a rollover sensor in each vehicle was determined from vehicle content data available on the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety's crash rating website. The resulting data set contained 14,003 weighted cases of rollover accidents in which the side air curtain did not deploy (40 raw count) and 23,178 cases of deployment (80 raw count).
Results: Several crash event and vehicle characteristics were similar for the nondeployed and deployed groups, including number of quarter turns, primary location of damage, initiating event for the rollover, and vehicle model year. However, the nondeployed group included significantly more passenger vehicle body types (vs. SUV or truck) and had a significantly lower rate of rollover sensor presence. Presence of a rollover sensor increased the odds air curtain deployment by a factor of 36.5 (95% confidence interval CI, 5.06-265). Cases in which both side air curtains deployed resulted in a higher frequency of injured occupants (Maximum Abbreviated Injury Scale MAIS ≥ 3). However, rollover events resulting in these injuries were also associated with higher rates of impact with another object or vehicle and damage to the roof of the vehicle, suggesting a higher energy event.
Conclusions: Nondeployment of the side curtain airbags in rollovers occurred more frequently in vehicles without dedicated rollover sensors, which were most frequently passenger vehicles.