3D Hand Scanning Methodology for Determining Protective Glove Dimensional Allowances.

There are two types of dimensional allowance (inner and external) related to two distinct areas of occupational health and safety: those being a measure of fit of personal protective equipment (PPE) and those determining the safe and comfortable human interaction with tools and machines, e.g., the latter ones result from wearing PPE increasing the dimensions of the human body and generating limitations in the work environment. In this paper, they are taken to mean the difference between the dimensions of a bare and gloved hand (including glove construction and materials). Dimensional allowances are important in designing the work environment, e.g., machine control panels and tools. The absolute and relative maximum values of dimensional allowances determined in this study for a hand in a firefighter's protective glove for the main anthropometric data are: 16.90 mm (5.90%) for length, 12.00 mm (13.77%) for width, and 15.70 mm (7.96%) for circumference. The obtained results are useful for designers, and especially for designing keys on control panels and LCD touch displays and monitors integrated with machines.

Alternative Methods of the Largest Lyapunov Exponent Estimation with Applications to the Stability Analyses Based on the Dynamical Maps-Introduction to the Method.

Controlling stability of dynamical systems is one of the most important challenges in science and engineering. Hence, there appears to be continuous need to study and develop numerical algorithms of control methods. One of the most frequently applied invariants characterizing systems' stability are Lyapunov exponents (LE). When information about the stability of a system is demanded, it can be determined based on the value of the largest Lyapunov exponent (LLE). Recently, we have shown that LLE can be estimated from the vector field properties by means of the most basic mathematical operations. The present article introduces new methods of LLE estimation for continuous systems and maps. We have shown that application of our approaches will introduce significant improvement of the efficiency. We have also proved that our approach is simpler and more efficient than commonly applied algorithms. Moreover, as our approach works in the case of dynamical maps, it also enables an easy application of this method in noncontinuous systems. We show comparisons of efficiencies of algorithms based our approach. In the last paragraph, we discuss a possibility of the estimation of LLE from maps and for noncontinuous systems and present results of our initial investigations.