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Editor's Note: This month TLT profiles the 2017 recipient of The Elmer E. Klaus Fellowship, Seyed Reza M. Moghaddam (University of Pittsburgh). The Klaus Fellowship, along with The E. Richard Booser Scholarship, are awarded annually to graduate and undergraduate students, respectively, who have an interest in pursuing a career in tribology. As a requirement for receiving an STLE scholarship, students are given the opportunity to participate in a tribology research project and to submit a report summarizing their research.
Seyed Reza M. Moghaddam is a doctorate candidate working with Dr. Kurt Beschorner in the Human Movement and Balance Laboratory (HMBL) at the University of Pittsburgh. His research work mainly focuses on the development of computational models for predicting shoe friction and wear. Moghaddam has developed modeling tools that can be used to design and optimize shoe tread and that have the potential to reduce injures due to slips and falls. You can reach him at [email protected].
1. INTRODUCTION
Falls impose an annual financial burden of $180B to the United States economy [1] and are a prevalent cause of occupational injuries [2]. Slipping is responsible for 4060% of occupational falling accidents [3]. Research has demonstrated that slipping can be prevented by increasing the available friction between the shoe and flooring on lubricated surfaces [4-6]. Thus, shoe design characteristics that enhance friction are likely to reduce the overall burden of slip and fall accidents.
Previous research by our group has identified that hysteresis friction due to viscoelastic properties of the shoe material is an important tribological mechanism when predicting shoe-floor-contaminant friction [7-9]. This finding has led to the development of computational techniques to model the shoe-floor hysteresis friction [10-15]. One of these efforts includes a multiscale finite element model [12] that predicts the whole shoe available coefficient of friction based on surface geometry, material properties and loading conditions. The multiscale framework uses microscopic features (i.e., pm) of the shoe and flooring [15] to generate a relationship between microscopic frictional shear stress and the nominal contact pressure between the shoe and floor surfaces. These relationships are then coupled with contact pressure distribution across the shoe surface predicted by macroscopic models (i.e., mm scale) [12] to determine whole-shoe coefficient of friction (COF).
This paper discusses some of the findings...