Hand and Arm Vibration Syndrome (HAVS) collectively refers to various hand-arm injuries due prolonged exposure of hand and arm to vibrations. Due to the complexity of the hand-arm system, exact pathology of the HAVS is not well-understood to this date. Two separate studies are conducted in this research to develop basic tools to study HAVS.
As the first study, a semi-analytical method to calculate the hand-arm response to the tool vibration is developed. The method is a two-step procedure. In the first step, the excitation force due to tool operation is estimated experimentally from the acceleration measured from a free-suspended tool operating in no-load condition. In the second step, the response of the tool is calculated from a theoretical model of the hand-arm system using the estimated force. It is demonstrated that the method can be used to assess the quality of a hand-arm simulation model using several lumped parameter models and a rigid beam model. The method can be used with any type of hand-arm model to obtain basic information to further study the issue of HAVS. The method also can be applied to estimate the force transmitted from the tool to the hand, which may be used as the basic data for further detailed analysis.
The second study is intended to develop an experimental method to demonstrate that vibration influences the flow rate of vascular circulation. A closed-loop flow test system with a small interchangeable test section is constructed for an in-vitro test of vascular circulation. Vibration is applied to the various test sections; however no significant vibration effect on the flow through the test section was observed. Necessary future studies are identified based on the results from this research.