This is a proposal to provide support for two distinguished Russian scientists to work with a US counterpart. The Russian-US team has worked together previously and has written a book, Optimal Protection from Impact, Shock, and Vibration (Gordon and Breach, 2001), on optimal protection, primarily of military hardware. The team wishes to initiate joint work in a new area, namely that of injury control under impact conditions. The interest in wheelchair occupant injury protection stems from the US participant having served earlier as the director of the University of Virginia (UVA) transportation research center for persons with disabilities. He was also the founder and director of the UVA Automobile Safety Laboratory (ASL), where extensive high speed sled testing of wheelchair tiedown systems has been performed. Much of the sled testing for the development of the ANSI/RESNA (American National Standards Institute/Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Society of North America) crashworthy wheelchair standard was conducted at the ASL. The goal of the proposed research is to develop the technology for characterizing the best possible (theoretically optimal) protection from impact for disabled persons during their transportation in assorted types of vehicles. The "theoretically optimal" is referred to as the limiting performance in this proposal. The limiting performance involves a protection system in which the structural configuration of the system is replaced by a generic force. Of particular interest in this project will be an investigation of the advantages of a pre-acting isolation unit.
