Abstract
Toe caps are one of the most important components in safety footwear, but have a significant contribution to the weight of the shoe. Efforts have been made to replace steel toe caps by polymeric ones, since they are lighter, insulated and insensitive to magnetic fields. Nevertheless, polymeric solutions require larger volumes, which has a negative impact on the shoe’s aesthetics. Therefore, safety footwear manufacturers are pursuing the development of an easy, low-cost and reliable solution to optimize this component. In this work, a solid mechanics toolbox built in the open-source computational library, OpenFOAM®, was used to simulate two laboratory standard tests (15 kN compression and 200 J impact tests). To model the polymeric material behavior, a neo-Hookean hyper-elasto-plastic material law with J2 plastic criteria was employed. A commercially available plastic toe cap was characterized, and the collected data was used for assessment purposes. Close agreements, between experimental and simulated values, were achieved for both tests, with an approximate error of 5.4% and 6.8% for the displacement value in compression and impact test simulations, respectively. The results clearly demonstrate that the employed open-source finite volume computational models offer reliable results and can support the design of toe caps for the R&D footwear industry.
Highlights
The sample from the toe cap shows several intense peaks at 1776 cm−1, 2968 cm−1, 2873 cm−1, and the doublet at 3060 and 3042 cm−1, where the first corresponds to the carbonyl stretching, and the others assigned to the aromatic bisphenol structure, these peaks are characteristic of a PC thermoplastic [58]
This work aimed at assessing the capability of using the solids4Foam toolbox, a free and open-source code developed in the framework of the OpenFOAM® computational library, to support the design of toe caps
The characterization of a commercial toe cap allowed the identification of the material typology as a neat polycarbonate without reinforcements, while the mechanical characterization described the stress-strain behavior to be used as input in the numerical simulations of compression and impact tests
Summary
Worker safety is of primary concern inside the workplace. More than 28% were in the lower extremities of industrial workers, which are the most prone group to this kind of injury. Employers from industrialized countries are required to provide personal protective equipment (PPE), to help mitigating any work-related injuries. PPE for safety footwear is available in three different standardized categories: safety shoes, protective shoes and occupational shoes, Table 1 [2,3,4]. They mainly differ in the protection level provided to the wearer through the use of a toe cap
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