The operation and maintenance of commercial building HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning) systems is illustrative of an industry that can benefit from the insightful use of all available information sources. Modern HVAC systems using direct digital control can potentially provide useful performance data. Occupant feedback complaint data and HVAC system trend data are stored within ...

OBJECTIVE Non-fatal tibia and ankle injuries without proper protection from the restraint system has gotten wide attention from researchers. This study aimed to investigate occupant tibia and ankle injuries under realistic frontal impact environment that is rarely considered in previous experimental and simulant studies. METHODS An integrated occupant-vehicle model was established by coupling...

OBJECTIVE This study was designed to characterize the restraint use of children in fatal crashes and to determine factors that were related to child restraint use. METHODS Crashes in which a vehicle occupant died were selected from the 1994 Fatal Analysis Reporting System data. Restraint use of children (0-9 years) in these crashes was characterized and examined in relation to vehicle and dri...

The risk of moderate or serious abdominal injury is higher for belted drivers in frontal crashes with a deployed airbag than for belted drivers not exposed to a deployed airbag. An analysis of roughly 13,000 belted front seat occupants in frontal crashes from National Automotive Sampling System / Crashworthiness Data System (NASS/CDS) case years 1993-2007 with and without airbag deployment were...

Objective: To compare results from high probability matched sets versus imputed matched sets across differing levels of linkage information. Methods: A series of linkages with varying amounts of available information were performed on two simulated datasets derived from multiyear motor vehicle crash (MVC) and hospital databases, where true matches were known. Distributions of high probability a...

Energy consumption for hot water production is a major draw in high efficiency buildings. Optimizing this has typically been approached from a thermodynamics perspective, decoupled from occupant influence. Furthermore, optimization usually presupposes existence of a detailed dynamics model for the hot water system. These assumptions lead to suboptimal energy efficiency in the real world. In thi...

This paper presents the design of a deployable and foldable tsunami pod for older and disabled people who cannot run to higher grounds during a tsunami attack. In our design, we adopt an ellipsoid structure and use finite element method (FEM) to model the structure. Then, we conduct numerical simulation and confirm the safety based on the von Mises equivalent value and the Head Injury Criterion...

One of the main consumers of energy in buildings are the HVAC systems intended to maintain the internal environment for the comfort and safety of the occupants. Occupant satisfaction, is influenced by many different factors, including air temperature, radiant temperature, humidity, the outdoor environment, activity levels and clothing. Occupant thermal comfort is traditionally measured by the P...

The armoured fighting vehicle (AFV) occupant composite system is modelled as a lumped parameter system, in this paper, wherein the 4 degrees of freedom (dof) biodynamic occupant model is integrated with 10 dof inplane AFV model including the crew seat, thus leading to the 14 dof vehicle-occupant composite model and the governing equations of motion are obtained. The composite model is subjected...