Design and evaluation of multifunctional protective clothing for tunnel workers

Abstract

By examining the requirements of tunnel workers, multifunctional tunnel protective clothing was proposed in this study. The traditional tunnel protective clothing was redesigned from the perspective of improving clothing structure and fabric. A safe and protective clothing system, incorporating a harmful gas detection module, position monitoring module and data transmission module, was developed. Objective evaluation tests were carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed protective clothing. During the medium-intensity exercise phase, the average skin temperature and humidity of the participants who wore the new protective clothing were 1.0725 °C and 2.6% lower, respectively, than those who wore the conventional protective clothing (p < 0.05). Furthermore, the new protective clothing system exhibited a highly sensitive and complete feedback mechanism. The positioning error could be controlled within ±10 cm, when the horizontal spacing distance of the base station was set to 200 m.

Keywords:

• tunnel protective clothing design
• comfort-related property
• gas monitoring
• position monitoring
• individual protection

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai [Grant Number 21ZR1400100]; Arts and Humanities Research Council: [Grant Number AH/T011483/1]; Shanghai Style Fashion Design & Value Creation Collaborative Innovation Center: [Grant Number ZX201311000031].