the history of the copper manikin

MANIKIN HISTORY

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The following is the history to how the copper manikin came to be a piece of equipment made to support what is actually impossible to prove. I maintain that it is categorically impossible to build a machine that can ever duplicate or even closely equate to how a living breathing human responds to all of the different climatic conditions that exist on the planet. There are companies such as Thermetrics LLC from whose web site I found this history who in my opinion knows they cannot build such a machine but will if you pay them build what they believe will do what you the buyer believe they can do. I spoke with one of their engineers I believe who is currently working on this project to make a new machine that will do something that is supposedly different than what already exists.

I asked him the ever present question; can you convert a “clo value” number to a Fahrenheit number and he said no. I told him I had a hot plate and if I tested my 12 ounce Lamilite on it versus a 12 ounce chopped staple fiber I would get about the same result, however when these products are now used in the manufacture of a sleeping bag the chopped staple product loses due to the need for quilting to hold the fiber in place. Lamilite maintains a uniform loft and can be laundered 1000 times and the chopped fiber can be laundered maybe once before it starts breaking apart. And because it is a quilt construction does not have much insulating capability. I did not tell him about the beauty of the silicone on Lamilite that allows moisture as a vapor to escape. I did tell him to go to my web site which he did as we spoke and to start reading from my first articles 1996 to the present so he could further his education about manikins.

He has had communication with Elizabeth Mc Culler who heads the KSU Environmental lab so I told him to ask her how a 3.5 pound Wiggy bag Ultra-Light has a clo value reading on her copper manikin of 4.5 and 3 years later a Wiggy’s 8 pound Antarctic bag tested on her copper manikin has a clo value reading of 4.9. I have these two reports as well as a few others in my position. They are erratic to say the least.

I told him I was unexpectedly part of a test for my desert bag buy the Marine Corps. A Major ordered 200 to be sent to the Middle East in gulf war one. Unbeknownst to me since the war ended quickly he sent them to 29 Palms Marine base. About two months later he told me they were issued to a 200 man unit to test. Imagine 200 young men all within 4 years of age of each other, wearing the same clothing, eating the same food and all involved in the same daily activity for a month. The coldest temperature I recommend the bag is plus 40 degrees and higher, it is only about 2 ½ pounds. They used it as low as plus 27 degrees. Now that is what I consider a proper way to test sleeping bags.

THERMAL MANIKIN HISTORY

Thomas L. Endrusick, B.Sc.

Leander A. Stroschein, B.Sc.

Richard R. Gonzalez, Ph.D.

U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine

Biophysics and Biomedical Modeling Division

Kansas Street

Natick, MA 01760-5007

Today, sophisticated thermal manikins are used worldwide in a vast array of government, industrial, and academic research settings to evaluate the environmental and occupational protective capabilities of clothing, footwear and handwear.

Yes they are used but the information that the users learn (?) from the machine with respect to temperature rating for the items mentioned would be doing the impossible.

However, prior to 1941, there was no method available for U.S. military clothing developers to accurately assess thermal heat transfer through protective clothing ensembles.

During the 1930's, 1 dimensional guarded-ring flat plates and 3 dimensional heated cylinders were commonly used to measure thermal resistance of single or multiple textile layers.

The development of the clo unit in 1941 by Gagge, Burton, and Bazett was an important advancement in clothing science as it provided for a standard measure of the thermal insulation of clothing. At that time, 1 clo equaled the insulation provided by a typical business suit. 2 clo could be said to provide twice the protection of a business suit, etc.. This concept of insulation was intentionally developed to be understood by non-scientists and was the first to establish a relationship between man, his clothing and the environment.

Please note these 3 guys say 1 clo and 2 clo, they do not equate either to F. why because they also knew each of us is different wearing the same clothing so they come up with a fictitious term that has no actual meaning.

Early Thermal Manikin History

The building of the first working thermal manikin for the U.S. military is attributed to Dr. Harwood Belding in 1941, who was working as a civilian contractor for the military at the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory testing protective clothing and equipment using human volunteers. Belding was inspired by a store window fashion manikin to build a crude, headless and armless manikin from stovepipe and various sheet metals. The manikin had a simple internal heater and fan to distribute the heat.

In 1942, Belding collaborated with engineers at the General Electric Co., in Bridgeport Connecticut to build a thermal manikin similar to the one GE had been using since 1939 in their research program to develop an electrically heated blanket for the consumer market. This manikin was formed from molds cast from an exquisite clay form done by the Connecticut sculptor, Leopold Schmidt. It was composed of an electroplated copper shell from 3 to 6 mm in thickness and had a single electrical circuit that uniformly heated the copper shell with a provision to vary the temperature of the hands and feet without affecting the surface temperature of the rest of the manikin's body. (This thermal manikin, later refurbished in 1971 and completely rebuilt in 1995 for better temperature control, is still used to evaluate protective clothing at the U.S. Army Research Institute).

Regardless how many times they rebuild the copper manikin the same result is accomplished; the samefictitious clo value. According to Einstein we have insanity at work here.

As World War II drew to a close, many members of the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory, including Belding and his thermal manikin, joined the U.S. Army Quartermaster General's new Climatic Research Laboratory in Lawrence, Massachusetts to continue work on improving environmental protection for military personnel. In September 1945, General Electric was asked to build the next generation thermal manikin for the Climatic Research Laboratory. General Electric combined its previous manikin expertise along with detailed data from an anthropometric study of nearly 3000 Army Air Force cadets to construct another electroplated copper shell manikin with a total of six separate electrical circuits and based on the average physical dimensions of a young U.S. military recruit.

Wow 3000 guys were studied and now they have a copper manikin that still does not give them any real knowledge.

WW II Thermal Manikin Research

From 1940-47, the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory under the direction of Belding conducted both basic and applied U.S. Army clothing research. During the war, they investigated reports of inadequacies in protective clothing capabilities coming in from various battlefronts, and suggested possible improvements to the Quartermaster's clothing specialists. In the process, Belding, along with fellow scientists using thermal manikins in Canadian and British clothing research efforts, developed the fundamental basis for today's scientific study of protective clothing.

Considering that the British military receives only chopped staple fiberfill jackets and sleeping bags that are useless and the Canadian military keeps buying down bags and I assume jackets even though they have a report done by the Canadian government demonstrating the down is a glutton for frost, but they and I know this for a fact LOVE to get clo values even though the troops freeze.

From 1941-1950, the Aero Medical Research Laboratory at Wright Air Field in Dayton, Ohio, conducted similar research for the U.S. Army Air Corps. They also obtained a General Electric thermal manikin in 1945, where Gagge and his associates used it to completely redesign most Army Air Force aviators clothing away from the use of natural to newly-developed artificial materials.

From 1942-54, the Climatic Research Laboratory in Lawrence, Massachusetts also conducted military clothing research. After WWII, this laboratory absorbed many scientists from the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory and grew into the lead military facility for conducting pioneering work on improving environmental protection for U.S. military personnel.

My opinion they have to this day failed to do that.

Thermal Manikin Research: 1950's

By the early 1950's, clothing researchers had successfully used thermal manikins to measure the resistance to sensible, dry, heat transfer of a wide range of protective clothing from all the military services. In the process, military footwear, handwear, sleeping bags, and combat clothing ensembles were further improved for comfort, durability, and environmental protection.

The above statement is a stretch.

Thermal manikin research during this decade also revealed that the highly curved surfaces of the human body created a complex and dynamic microclimate between the clothing and skin surface. Unlike the heat transfer characteristics of textiles established from earlier guarded ring flat plate work, thermal manikins showed that actual clothing, when draped over the human figure, can have localized variations in thermal conductivity as well as in the ensemble's convective and radiative properties.

This paragraph is gobbly goop.

Thermal Manikin Research: 1960's

In 1961, most military thermal manikin work was centered at the new U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine (also known as "USARIEM") located at Natick, Massachusetts. One area of new research was focused on the resistance by protective clothing to the transport of water vapor and its impact on soldier performance. This work was possible due to the introduction of the moisture permeability index (im) by Woodcock in 1962 who was then working at USARIEM. This value is the ratio of the maximum evaporative cooling, at a given ambient vapor pressure, from a 100% wetted surface through a fabric, to the maximum evaporative cooling of a psychrometric wet bulb thermometer at the same vapor pressure. This parameter characterized the permeability of clothing materials to the transfer of water vapor.

But today the soldier is dressed in clothing that does not permit the vapor to get out of the clothing the troops are wearing.

Woodcock used a sweating, heated cylinder to conduct his permeability evaluations of both the bare cylinder surface and various protective clothing textiles. Goldman and Breckenridge, interested in utilizing this index for practical clothing applications, outfitted thermal manikins with tight fitting cotton skins that could be saturated with water to simulate a sweat wetted skin surface. These "sweating" manikins could now measure the maximum evaporative heat transfer allowed to an individual wearing a given protective ensemble. This work made it possible to begin a concerted effort to increase the "breathability" of chemical and biological protective clothing.

To this day that has not happened.

Thermal Manikin Research: 1970's

Comparisons made between thermal manikin data and controlled human volunteer studies indicated that the movement of air within and immediately adjacent to a multilayered clothing system could have a dramatic impact on the evaporative cooling potential of the protective ensemble. Consequently, Givoni and Goldman developed a pumping coefficient ('p') that described the effects of wearer-generated air motion on the thermal and water vapor resistances of clothing.

Givoni and Goldman then used clothing thermal and water vapor resistances from thermal manikins along with the derived pumping coefficient to develop a series of equations that predicted rectal temperature when wearing military clothing in a range of cool to very hot environments. These early equations were further modified by Givoni and Goldman to predict heart rate while wearing protective clothing and working in stressful environments.

Here I think they are using their rectal brains jointly.

In the mid-1970's, thermal manikin data continued to be critical coefficient input as these equations were developed into more sophisticated predictive models. Pandolf and associates made modifications to assess the impact of the level of dehydration, and Givoni and Goldman further enhanced the models to include the effects of acclimatization on wearers of protective clothing.

They really were working at job security.

Thermal Manikin Research: 1980's To Present

In the early 1980's, the U.S. Army began a complete redesign of major clothing systems for air, ground, and vehicle based personnel utilizing a variety of novel technologies and materials. On an increasing basis, the military has evaluated and then adopted numerous commercial textile developments (i.e., Gore-Tex, Thinsulate, Primaloft) for use in these new combat clothing, footwear, handwear, and sleeping systems. In fact, several U.S. textile manufacturers created specialized, in-house groups interfacing directly with military clothing developers to provide ready access to novel developments and test results.

They adopted three components that have demonstrated over and over again to be non-functioning materials. One has been replaced, the Primaloft but the other two remail so troops will continue to have foot problems.

In 1984, USARIEM began using a new articulated, thermal manikin employing 19 separate heating zones, which has the ability to simulate the bodily movements involved in walking and running. The manikin is housed in a climatic chamber with precise control over the air velocity directed at the manikin. A minimum of three different air velocities are usually necessary to accurately determine the effect of air movement on the thermal and moisture transfer properties of protective clothing ensembles.

They could have 1900 heating zones and they still will not have a piece of equipment that will give them any useful information.

Thermal manikins have evolved within the U.S. military as a direct result of the need to provide better personal protective clothing and equipment in an increasing variety of environmental zones of operation. Thermal manikin data have been instrumental in improving both the comfort and functional performance of a multitude of military clothing and equipment as well as providing input to develop tactical clothing issue doctrine and practical human performance predictive models.

NONSENSE!!!

When reality sets in whatever this company or any other company comes up with the theoretical information that is derived will have no value at all because it is only theoretical. This is a make work project for people who want job security because when they will look at the short comings when they realize that the clothing that is derived from their new study will not work any better than the old garments created.

Now you know as much as me about copper manikins. And I think the young man that I spoke with may also now doubt that they can make a machine that will work.

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