Engineers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are designing a personal cooling system for the Navy that circulates chilled air through the flight suits and helmets of fighter pilots. Unlike other approaches that circulate chilled water, the new system augments the body's natural cooling system. "Instead of simply cooling the skin through a fabric, our approach removes heat from the body surface and provides cool air to breathe," says James Klett. He points out that the lungs have large surface areas for dissipating heat and blood serves as an effective heat transfer medium. The enabling technology for the cooling system uses the high thermal conductivity of a new graphite foam developed by Klett and his team. "Thermal conductivity is basically how fast heat is transferred through a material," says Klett. The foam is as thermally conductive as aluminum. However, the thermal conductivity-to-weight ratio is five times better than aluminum. "So if you put an ice cube on a block of graphite foam and another on a block of aluminum, you would feel the ice 5 times faster," says Klett. The foam reduces heat losses and improves efficiencies. Potential applications include suits worn by firefighters, racecar drivers, hazardous materials workers, and ground troops. For more information contact, contact Bill Corwin at (865) 574-1000 or visit www.ornl.gov.
A next-generation guided ammunition system for intercepting enemy fire that Lockheed Martin is developing for the Army has hit its targets in an initial series of tests by the company.
Against a backdrop of mounting product complexity and a need to keep a lid on development costs, companies are recognizing a need to make simulation a more integral part of the design process. In response, vendors in the CAD world are building out CAE functionality as part of their CAD suites while simulation vendors are building tighter integrations to leading CAD tools. Keith Meintjes, Ph.D., Practice Manager, Simulation and Analysis at CIMdata, Inc., joins Design News CAD Editor Beth Stackpole in this radio program to explore the new face of integrated CAD and CAE, how companies are benefitting from this tighter partnership between platforms, and how integrating CAE earlier in the development cycle pays off in optimized product designs.
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