Integrated Digital Engineering Environment for PPE Development (IDEEP)

To leverage the advantages of computational modeling and digital technologies for personal protective equipment (PPE) development, new digital technology that allows for rapid design exploration to couple with state-of-the-art models is needed. This leads to this Topic with the objective to develop a digital design tool for PPE that allows for rapid exploration of the entire design space. To address the need of this Topic, Innovision team propose an innovative solution—Integrated Digital Engineering Environment for PPE development (IDEEP), which consists of five functional modules, a knowledge base and data center, and a toolbox. Given a PPE selection and design objectives, design tasks will be performed by those modules, following a typical workflow as follows: (a) Initial design, which creates a set of design instances in the design space; (b) Virtual prototyping, which uses finite element modeling to create a virtual product of each design; (c) Virtual testing, which integrates a PPE model with a human body model to simulate the multi-physical performance of the PPE being designed; (d) Design optimization, which determines the optimal design based on simulation results using data-driven methodologies; and (e) Assessment/certification, which assesses the performance of the optimal design based on extensive simulations. If the optimal design meets design requirements and performance criteria, it will be taken as the final design; Otherwise, a new design iteration will be started until a satisfactory design is achieved.