Seminar report

vibration Transmissibility Characteristics And Analysis Of Glove-Hand-Arm System

ABSTRACT
Prolonged, intensive exposure to hand-transmitted vibration could cause a series of disorders in the sensorineural, vascular, and muscular systems of the fingers, which are the major components of hand-arm vibration syndrome. The handarm responses to vibration have been mostly investigated in terms of biodynamic responses, which are believed to serve as the essential foundation for understanding the mechanisms associated with vibration-induced disorders and for developing better risk assessment methods. Moreover, thorough characterizations of the biodynamic responses are considered vital for design and assessment of vibration attenuation devices, and for developing handarm vibration simulators for assessment of power tools. The vibration power absorption density (VPAD) is a good measure for the vibration exposure intensity of the soft tissues of the fingers. In order to calculate the VPAD at a fingertip, we proposed a hybrid modeling approach, which combines a 2D finite element (FE) model with a lumped parameter model. Whereas the lumped components are used to represent the global biodynamic characteristics of the hand-arm system, the FE component is used to predict the detailed stresses, strains, and VPAD in the fingertip The transmission of handle vibration to the wrist, elbow and the shoulder of the human hand and arm are characterized in the laboratory for the bent-arm and extended arm postures. Anti-vibration (AV) gloves have been increasingly used to help reduce the vibration exposure. However, the exact mechanisms of the AV gloves have not been seriously analyzed and sufficiently understood. How to appropriately assess the effectiveness of AV gloves for protecting the hand remains an issue for further studies. Therefore, the vibration transmissibility of the glove, the ratio of the vibration at the glove- hand interface to the handle vibration, is typically used as a measure of the glove effectiveness .The proposed model is applied to predict the effectiveness of the glove in terms of vibration transmitted to the fingers-glove and palm-glove interfaces, the finger bones, and the wrist.

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Dept Of Mechanical Engineering

Seminar report

vibration Transmissibility Characteristics And Analysis Of Glove-Hand-Arm System

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
Vibration is the study of motions which repeat itself after an interval of time. It is the most important criteria that have to be considered during design. It is both useful and harmful to engineering systems. Unwanted vibrations may cause rapid wearing of machine parts, excessive stresses etc. Usually in industries, the workers dealing with powered hand tools. Clinical studies have shown that the operators of hand-held power tools are prone to develop various vibration induced disorders of the hand and arm, which are collectively referred as Hand-Arm Vibration Syndrome (HAVS). Prolonged, intensive exposure to hand transmitted vibrations has been associated with a series of disorders in the vascular, sensorineural, musculoskeletal structures of the human fingers and hand-arm system. The characteristics of HAVS, generated by the operation of power tools are considered to be affected by dynamics of coupled tool hand system. Hence the vibration transmission characteristics of power tools and proper vibration attenuation mechanism have to be investigated. The primary objective of the seminar is to analyze the vibration transmissibility in the finger tip[1], hand-arm system under different postures [2]. The primary technique used in study is Vibration Power Absorption Density (VPAD) technique. As a mean to eliminate vibration induced disorders, an anti-vibration glove [3] is analyzed. Mechanical equivalent models of finger tip and hand-arm system with glove are developed.

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Dept Of Mechanical Engineering

Seminar report

vibration Transmissibility Characteristics And Analysis Of Glove-Hand-Arm System

CHAPTER 2 EXPERIMENTAL SET-UP

Figure 1. Block diagram of experimental set-up

The block diagram of the experimental set-up is shown in fig 1. An instrumented 40mm diameter cylindrical handle was used in this study. The handle consists of two kistler force sensors to measure the grip force. The handle with base fixture was installed on an

electrodynamic shaker.

Five triaxial accelerometers were used to measure the vibration

transmission. One triaxial accelerometer was installed inside the handle and other four are attached to the different locations of hand-arm system. The experiments were conducted with two different hand-arm postures (P1-bent arm with 900 elbow angle; P2- extended arm with 1800 elbow angle). The vibrations transmitted to four different locations on the hand-arm system were measured using triaxial accelerometers.

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Dept Of Mechanical Engineering

Seminar report

vibration Transmissibility Characteristics And Analysis Of Glove-Hand-Arm System

The accelerometers were attached to Velcro strips, which were tightly fastened near the joints. The locations include the wrist, shoulder and near the elbow joints on the fore arm and upper side arms as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2.Experimental set-up a) Bent arm posture b) Extended arm posture

The experiments were conducted with three different grip forces (10N,30N,50N) and two different magnitudes of broad-band random vibration in the range 2.5-2500Hz. Various physical dimensions of the hand-arm system such as weight, height and body mass index are also measured, in order to study their effect on vibration transmissibility.

Figure 3. Instrumented handle (40mm in diameter and 115mm effective grip length)

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Dept Of Mechanical Engineering

Seminar report

vibration Transmissibility Characteristics And Analysis Of Glove-Hand-Arm System

CHAPTER 3 MODELING 3.1: MODELING OF FINGER TIP

Mechanical equivalent model of a hand-arm system does not consider the anatomical substructures of the fingers. So it cannot be used to predict the vibration absorption power in the sections of a finger. Hence a separate modeling of the finger tip is required to analyze the vibration transmissibility. A new modeling approach known as Vibration Power Absorption Density (VPAD) technique is introduced to analyze the vibration exposure intensity of the soft tissues of finger tip. The technique is a hybrid modeling approach, which combines a 2D finite element (FE) model with a lumped parameter model. The lumped components are used to represent the global biodynamic characteristics of the hand-arm system whereas the FE component is used to predict the detailed stresses, strains, and VPAD in the finger tip. The lumped parameters are determined by using the vibration transmissibility measured at the finger tip, while the material parameters of the soft and hard tissues of the FE model are adopted from the published experimental data. The proposed model was applied to predict the distributions of dynamic displacement, velocity, and VPAD in the soft tissues of the finger tip. The hybrid model of a finger tip is shown in Figure.4. The finger tip is simulated using a 2D finite element model, while the effective mass of the handfinger is represented by the mass element m. The coupling between the finger tip and handfinger is represented by the spring and damping element (K1 and C1). The contact between the finger tip and the vibrating plate is simulated in the FE modeling, while the coupling between the hand and the vibrating plate is represented by a spring/damping unit (K3 and C3). The coupling between the hand, forearm, and ground is represented by using another spring/damping unit (K2 and C2). The finger tip model was assumed to be composed of skin layers, subcutaneous tissue, bone, and nail. The biquadral, plain-strain elements were used in the FE models and the commercial FE software package, ABAQUS (version 6.8), was utilized for the analyses. The nail is considered to have a thickness of 0.60mm.

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Dept Of Mechanical Engineering

Seminar report

vibration Transmissibility Characteristics And Analysis Of Glove-Hand-Arm System

The skin is assumed to be composed of two layers: the outer skin (100 mm thick) and inner skin (1.26mm thick). The outer skin layer contains stratum corneum (SC) and a part of the viable epidermis; and is considered as linearly elastic (Youngs modulus of 2MPa and Poissons ratio of 0.30); while the inner skin layer is composed of dermis and a part of the viable epidermis, and is characterized as nonlinearly elastic. The bone and nail are assumed to be linearly elastic, and have Poissons ratio of 0.30 and Youngs moduli of 17.0GPa and 170.0MPa, respectively. The vibrating plate was assumed to have a thickness of 25mm and a at contact surface. The plate was considered to be made of aluminum with Youngs modulus of 77.9GPa and Poissons ratio of 0.30.

Figure 4. Hybrid model of a finger tip

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Seminar report

vibration Transmissibility Characteristics And Analysis Of Glove-Hand-Arm System

The VPAD is defined as the vibration power absorption per unit volume of tissue. Assuming a tissue element with a volume, volume= xyz is subjected to a sinusoidal vibration, u, under uniaxial force in the x direction; fx, the VPA and VPAD of the tissue element are derived conceptually:

and is the stress and strain, respectively; is the excitation frequency in rad/s. Soft tissues are generally subjected to multi-axial loading, therefore, the contributions of the normal and shear stress/strain in all axes should be considered:

Where ab and ab are the tensors of stress and strain respectively. For a linear system, both stress and strain are linearly proportional to the vibration magnitude, U, which is related to the input acceleration, A, by U2A. Therefore, it will be reasonable to assume that the VPAD is proportional to the square of the acceleration A.

Where structure.

is a parameter that is dependent on stiffness and damping characteristics of the

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vibration Transmissibility Characteristics And Analysis Of Glove-Hand-Arm System

3.2 MODELING OF HAND-ARM SYSTEM

Figure.5. 5-DOF model of the hand-arm system

M0 is the apparent mass of shoulder and a part of the upper body. M1 is the apparent mass of palm, wrist and fore arm. M2 is the apparent mass of fingers, bones and part of the finger soft tissues. M3 is the apparent mass of palm contact skin with handle and M4 is the apparent mass of finger contact skin. K0 and C0 are the stiffness and damping coefficient of shoulder. K1 and C1 are that of forearm and K2 and C2 are of wrist and palm. Stiffness and damping coefficient of palm contact skin and finger contact skin are represented by K3, C3 and K4, C4 respectively. Y is the amplitude of excitation from the handle and x is are the amplitudes of vibrations of corresponding masses. The model responses were evaluated using a set of preselected model parameters and a sinusoidal input at the handle along the forearm direction at each center frequency one-third octave bands.

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Dept Of Mechanical Engineering

Seminar report

vibration Transmissibility Characteristics And Analysis Of Glove-Hand-Arm System

3.3 MODELING OF GLOVED HAND-ARM SYSTEM

Figure 6. 7 DOF model of gloved hand-arm system

Physically, a glove can be viewed as an equivalent mechanical system added to the handarm system. The model of a gloved handarm system can thus be derived by adding equivalent elastic, viscous, and inertia properties of the glove to the handarm system model, as shown in Figure. 6. The glove material between the handle and glove-hand interface is represented by its lumped stiffness (K5 and K6), damping (C5and C6), and mass properties (M5, M6, M7and M8) distributed at the finger - and palm-side interfaces. The distributed lumped sub-models are coupled through the stiffness and damping elements (K7 and C7). The other part of the glove is represented by additional masses (M9 and M10), stiffness (K8), and damping (C8), as shown in Fig. 6.

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vibration Transmissibility Characteristics And Analysis Of Glove-Hand-Arm System

The coupled hand-glove model can be employed to determine the properties of vibration transmitted to several important substructures of the model, particularly the substructures coupling the vibrating handle through the glove, such that: Vibration transmissibility, At finger contact surface (M4),

At finger bones (M2),

At palm contact surface (M3),

At palm, wrist, forearm substructure (M1),

Effectiveness of the glove at finger and wrist can be calculated by the equations,

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vibration Transmissibility Characteristics And Analysis Of Glove-Hand-Arm System

CHAPTER 4 RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS 4.1 Distribution of vibration magnitude in finger tip

Figure 7. Distribution of the vibration magnitude along the centre line of the finger

The distributions of vibration magnitude, velocity, and VPAD along the central line of the fingertip model are depicted in Figure. 7. The spatial distances of the plots refer to the fingertip in the undeformed state. The distributions of these parameters within the soft tissues are of major concern (i.e., the range from the bone/soft tissue interface to the tissue/plate contact interface). The frequency-dependent characteristics of the vibration penetrations into the soft tissues are quantitatively analyzed in this figure. At the tissue/plate contact surface, the vibration velocity is constant at 8mm/s and the corresponding vibration magnitude decreases with increasing frequency. However the distributions of the vibration within the soft tissue depend

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vibration Transmissibility Characteristics And Analysis Of Glove-Hand-Arm System

on the frequency; especially when the frequency is equal to or greater than 125Hz, the distribution patterns of the vibration in the soft tissue varied suddenly.

Figure 8.Distribution of vibration magnitude at 125Hz

4.2 Effect of grip force on vibration transmissibility

Figure 9 shows the mean transmissibility measured at the wrist, elbow and the shoulder for the three grip forces (10, 30 and 50N) and two postures (bent-arm P1 and extended arm P2). The results are presented for a constant push force of 50N. In general, an increase in the grip force increases the magnitude of vibration transmitted to all locations for both postures. For the P1 posture, a change in the grip force yields negligible effect on the vibration transmitted along the wrist and the shoulder in the 2.515Hz range but yields an increase in the vibration magnitudes above 15Hz. The influence of the grip force on the wrist and elbow transmissibility magnitudes is more evident in the bent-arm (P1) posture than the extended arm (P2) posture above 15Hz.This

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vibration Transmissibility Characteristics And Analysis Of Glove-Hand-Arm System

may be attributed to the stiffening of the muscles/tissues and joints in the extended arm posture, which tends to increase both the stiffness and the damping of the handarm system.

4.3 Effect of glove parameters on vibration transmissibility

Table 1 shows that the values of each glove at the fingers and palm interfaces ( K6 and K5) are considerably larger than those of the fingers and palm contact stiffness values (K3 and K4) respectively. The presence of a glove can thus reduce the overall coupling stiffness between the hand and the handle. As listed in Table 1 , the identified glove parameters values of M5, M6, M8,M10, C7, and C8 are either zero or very small, which suggest that they are not essential. Also the eliminations of M9, K7 and K8 from the glove model dont change the transmissibility of the gloves. The effect of M7 on the transmissibility could also be ignored at frequencies less than 50Hz but its variation could largely affect the transmissibility at frequencies higher than 100Hz.The contact

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vibration Transmissibility Characteristics And Analysis Of Glove-Hand-Arm System

stiffness and damping properties (K5, C5, K6, and C6) of the gloves are the most critical parameters in view of their vibration transmission characteristics. Although the materials of each glove at the finger and palm sides are similar, the glove contact stiffness at the finger side (K6) is substantially greater than that at the palm side (K5), as also shown in Table1. This may be because the contact pressure at the fingers is concentrated in a smaller area. The high contact stiffness may be reduced to increase the effectiveness of the gloves.

Table1. Parameters of the gloved hand-arm system

parameter M5 M6 M7 M8 M9 M10 K5 K6 K7 K8 C5 C6 C7 C8 Figure.10 shows the Units Kg Kg Kg Kg Kg Kg N/m N/m N/m N/m Ns/m Ns/m Ns/m Ns/m comparisons of the palmand Value 0 0 0.0673 0 0.0107 0 177385 327301 2116 923 89 75 0 0 finger-side vibration

transmissibility responses of glove. In this parametric study, the stiffness and damping ratios are proportionally reduced by 80, 60 and 40 percent of the identified values, termed as the nominal

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vibration Transmissibility Characteristics And Analysis Of Glove-Hand-Arm System

values. The results clearly show that lower stiffness and damping values yield greater attenuation of vibration to the palm and fingers at frequencies above the respective resonances, while slightly higher amplifications at frequencies below the resonance are also evident. As also shown in Fig.10, the glove cannot effectively isolate the vibration transmitted to the fingers at frequencies less than 100Hz even when its stiffness and damping are reduced substantially to 40 percent of the nominal values.

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vibration Transmissibility Characteristics And Analysis Of Glove-Hand-Arm System

CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSIONS
A new approach for assessing the transmissibility of anti-vibration gloves was proposed and evaluated in this study. A distinct advantage of this approach is that the glove transmissibility can be predicted without imposing any interference to the glove and the handarm system, which makes it possible to assess the true vibration isolation effectiveness of the glove. The results show that the human handarm system in an extended arm posture amplifies the vibration transmitted to the upper-arm and the trunk at frequencies below 25Hz. Furthermore, this posture attenuates the transmitted vibration more effectively than the bent-arm posture above 25Hz, except at the shoulder. This suggests that operators of power tools with frequencies below 25Hz may experience greater muscles/tissues fatigue and symptoms of musculoskeletal disorder when working with extended arm posture. The results of this study demonstrate that the vibration isolation effectiveness of a glove is controlled by the resonant frequencies of the glove-handarm system and that reducing the resonant frequencies can increase the effectiveness of the glove. This can be achieved using two different approaches: (I) to reduce the glove contact stiffness (K5and K6) and (II) to increase the effective mass of the hand (M2 and M3). The use of the first approach can be effective for the reduction of the vibration transmitted to the palm but it is not very effective for the reduction of the vibration transmitted to the fingers. This is mainly because the finger effective mass (M2) is generally very small. The effective mass due to the fingers may also be increased by increasing the mass of the glove coupling the fingers (M8). However, it would pose design and implementation challenges, since it could raise some ergonomic problems related to dexterity loss, glove weight, and handling and control of the tool. A feasible approach is perhaps to apply a rigid metal cover on the top of an AV handle wrap, which could yield more rigid coupling (K7) between the distributed glove masses (M7 and M8).

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vibration Transmissibility Characteristics And Analysis Of Glove-Hand-Arm System

REFERENCES
1.John Z. Wu , Ren G. Dong, Daniel E. Welcome, Xueyan S. Xu, A method for analyzing vibration power absorption density in human fingertip,Journal of Sound and Vibration,Article in Press. 2.S.A. Adewusi, S. Rakheja, P. Marcotte, J. Boutin, Vibration transmissibility characteristics

of the human handarm system under different postures, hand forces and excitation levels,Journal of Sound and Vibration, 329(2010) 2953-2971. 3.Ren G. Dong, Thomas W. McDowell, Daniel E. Welcome, Christopher Warrena, JohnZ. Wu, Subhash Rakheja, Analysis of anti-vibration gloves mechanism and evaluation methods, Journal of Sound and Vibration, 321(2009) 435-453. 4.R.G. Dong, D.E. Welcome, T.W. McDowell, J.Z. Wu, Measurement of biodynamic response of human handarm system, Journal of Sound and Vibration, 294(2006) 807-827.

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