"Everyday someone somewhere feels the force of impact." "When two objects crash into each other, trouble follows." "Now science is hitting back." "Stress testing ways to protect us from the destructive power of impact." ""Stress Test:" "Impact"" "Impact, it's what happens in a collision." "The impact releases energy causing the objects involved to bend, break or rebound in response." "The force has to go somewhere." "Scientists are trying to control the violent effects of impact, making the world a safer place." "In 1992, Stan Goldenberg lost everything when Hurricane Andrew hurled debris at 150 miles per hour into his family home." "The impact of the debris flattened the building, now all that's left is this empty lot." "Stan is himself a meteorologist." "He and scientists everywhere have long tried to figure out how to minimize the destruction caused by hurricanes." "Most of the damage is actually caused not by the wind itself, but by what the wind throws around." "Hurricanes rip off roofs, tear up trees, and send debris flying with such force that it can cut through a palm tree like butter." "Hurricane Andrew was one of the most damaging hurricanes actually, in the history of the United States, not in terms of the human life but it in terms of the property damage." "The property damage in Hurricane Andrew was estimated to be about 25 billion dollars." "The hurricane-strength wind barged into houses and blew walls and roofs out." "Then the real trouble started." "Every single broken piece becomes a flying missile." "And as it hits the windows and other houses in its path, those houses in turn, lose their windows." "And that allows the air to come in and the roofs again begin to fly from them." "So now it adds more debris to the already very fast hurricane winds." "As Hurricane Andrew rolled in that summer day in 1992, and Miami braced itself for the storm, Stan Goldenberg had a more pressing engagement, his wife Barbara was in labor with their third child." "Here we are, at Doctors Hospital 23rd of August at 9:00 o'clock in the morning, you can see the hurricane center in the distance." "As everybody sits around and waits Barbara going through early stages of labor." "I had gone into the hospital on Sunday morning and basically about three-thirty or four in the afternoon," "Pearl arrived and nice smooth delivery no complications." "Just thank god we had a healthy baby." "And now we get to wait for a Category Five Hurricane to hit Miami." "That night, Stan went home to look after the rest of his family." "He'll never forget what happened next." "We were in the hallway originally, and as the boards started ripping off the windows, we were waiting with anticipation when the front window might go." "And we still remember the explosion of that window." "And then we had the hurricane in the house." "And the next thing that happens it smashed out the back sliding-glass door." "So we had basically the breezeway." "And as we crossed that breezeway my four-and-a-half-year-old," "Aaron slipped and started to slide out the back, and my nephew Joseph grabbed him and pulled him back." "We got into the kitchen and put ourselves kind of hunkered down with the mattress and a couch." "We never dreamed, we never dreamed it would be so bad." "Lord we just thank you, we ask for your protection in Jesus' name." "Then something very heavy fell on my back, and we found out later that the living room-kitchen wall had fallen on us." "I was pinned under, like the stove was on my back and the roar just kept increasing and increasing and just pressing this wall down on us." "My roof ripped off in one piece carrying the concrete tie-beam with it, flew over our fence and smashed into the neighbor's house." "Stan was one of thousands who lost their homes that night." "Windows could not resist the force of impact from flying debris." "Once through the windows, the wind did its worst." "The destruction was so bad, that South Florida changed its laws as a result." "Now all new designs for windows, doors and shutters have to pass a stress test." "Dr. Waqar Ali has come up with a dramatic test." "It recreates the effect of a roofiing timber being hurled at a window by a hurricane." "Today at Miami's Hurricane Test Center, a team from the South Florida Glazing Company is trying out a new glass for shop windows." "Their new product is a double glazed panel with plastic laminate sandwiched in between." "The team watches nervously as the glass faces its enemy." "The strengthened glass has shattered, but it held together." "After the impact the glass keeps on breaking up." "But Dr Ali is looking for something else now." "So you're hearing the crackling sound, actually, which is coming from the glass breaking into smaller pieces." "And what I am looking at is actually a couple of things, number one, there should be no penetration in this test, there should be no rapture basically beyond a certain size." "Now in this glass, we don't see any rapture." "The adhesion of the glass to the frame is very, very well." "It's doing perfectly well right now." "And so we'll basically go and wait for the next second test and see how that test goes actually." "That's a more critical test." "The window survived the impact test, but there's more to come." "During the hurricane there are huge changes in pressure." "To get South Florida's seal of approval, the fractured window has to resist these pressure changes for a further 36 hours of testing." "So the glass panel is sealed onto a frame and a pressure pump sucks and blows behind it to recreate the winds." "If Stan's windows had passed these tests, the family home might have looked very different in the calm after the storm." "And there's our address and the front door is still standing, and there is Benjamin and Joseph and Rubin." "What do you got to say about it?" "Was it scary?" "Yeah." "I never saw the house again actually," "I didn't even get to see the, the destroyed home because we left the area because of the new baby, and, and they had to bulldoze the house because it was, it was condemned, like many other homes." "The home was never rebuilt but our family was intact and that was what was important." "Out at sea, hurricanes whip up giant waves." "When those huge waves hit ships the effect can be catastrophic." "But stress testing vessels at sea is expensive and dangerous." "So models in test tanks are used to mimic scenarios at sea." "The problem is, the bigger the ship the bigger the test tank needs to be." "This is the largest testing tank in the world." "At over two thirds of a mile it's longer than ten football fields end to end." "The Carderock Naval Surface Warfare Center just north of Washington DC, uses the tank to test designs for better warships and more efficient super tankers." "This giant, electrically powered trolley runs on rails." "It pushes the hull of a test ship through the water, as fast as the fastest destroyer." "For the tests to be reliable, everything has to be accurately to scale." "The tank even matches the curvature of the Earth." "This trial is investigating the impact of a bow wave on an aircraft carrier." "The hull is a 40-foot scale model of a giant 1,000-foot ship." "The engineers at Carderock pride themselves on being able to stress test almost any ocean going vessel." "Their chance to prove it came after the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster." "Just past midnight on March 24th of that year, the Exxon Valdez oil tanker struck a reef in Prince William Sound in Alaska." "Piloted by a deck hand, while the captain slept off the effects of alcohol, the ship struck a rock." "11 million gallons of crude oil spilled out, devastating 470 miles of beautiful coastline and its wild life." "The initial clean up cost over two billion dollars." "At Carderock, naval architect Jerry Sikora was asked to figure out how to prevent future disasters." "A conventional tanker such as the Exxon Valdez has got a single hull made out of steel and there is oil on the inside and the ocean is on the outside." "So that when the outer hull was ruptured, all the oil came gushing right out into, into the bay." "One of the concepts that we had been looking at was a double hull, in which case you have your outer hull which keeps the sea out, but then inside of that hull is another hull, another steel hull built" "inside where the oil is contained in the inner hull." "Jerry had to come up with a test that would tell him whether the double hull would work in real life." "This contraption was the result." "A rock, a piece of tanker hull and railroad cars on either side." "The orange line is the outer hull, the blue line, the inner." "On top, is a concrete load representing the weight of the ship." "The steel cone is the rock a scaled-down version of the one the Exxon Valdez ran into." "The whole device will hit the rock at the same speed the tanker was going." "Analysis of the inner hull showed the impact in detail and Jerry didn't like what he saw." "The inner and outer hulls on the test sample were connected like corrugated cardboard by steel struts." "When the test rock tore through the outer hull, the struts made the inner skin tear too." "The idea of a rigid structure is not very good for collisions." "It tends to give you hard points, it tends to tear the structure, it tends to propagate the energy further into the structure." "So Jerry cut away three out of every four struts." "This made the hull more flexible on impact." "With the struts removed, the test showed that the inner hull bent but it didn't split." "It was pleasantly surprising, yes." "The results were so convincing that Congress acted on them." "Congress passed the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 mandating that all future tankers be constructed in a double hull configuration." "But the change didn't happen right away." "Well unfortunately, the, the Oil Pollution Act mandated over a series of 20 years before all the tankers would be, would be replaced by double hull tankers so most of the tankers that are still out, that are still at sea" "are single hull tankers." "Even though Jerry's ingenious test had shown that double hulls do work, the world's oil pollution problems aren't over." "In 1996, another single hulled supertanker ran on to the rocks." "The Sea Empress spilled 72,000 tons of crude oil off the British coast, destroying beaches and wildlife." "More than ten years after Jerry Sikora's tests, two-thirds of the world's oil tanker fleet are still sailing with no more than a single sheet of steel between oil and ocean." "Large-scale collisions and disasters make headlines." "But every time you play a sport, your own body is subject to repeated impacts." "When you hit or kick a ball, that ball soaks up energy from the impact." "But some energy is also transferred to the player who feels it as vibration." "There's one sport where repeated tiny impacts can do really serious damage." "Fatigue is a frequent cause of accidents." "And, fatigue is brought on by the relentless vibrations driven up the legs from the skis." "If only skis could be equipped with some kind of shock absorber, to prevent accidents." "Such a device might also decrease repetitive impact damage to rattled joints." "Scientist and keen skier, Ken Lazarus has felt these forces first hand." "He's invented such a device to make skiing easier on the body." "It's an almost magical thing called a piezocontroller." "He discovered it while working in the aerospace industry, where it was being stress tested to see if it could reduce vibrations in jet fighters." "What we developed was a vibration control system to stop those big vibrations in the back of the tail." "When you turn it on, the electronic device transforms vibration into a tiny electrical charge." "That charge is called piezoelectricity." "Tests on an airplane tail showed that up to half the vibrations disappear when the piezo shock absorbers are activated." "Ken realized that what worked for an airplane might also work elsewhere." "And you just start thinking about," ""What else can I apply this to, as a curious person."" "Say well, I know I ski." "And this looked like a natural of applying the technology to ski, giving you better performance and preventing some of the shock from coming in to your body, and easing the, the feel on your body so you don't feel as tired after a long day of skiing." "The next step for Ken was to adapt the piezocontroller for skis." "This is actually our piezocontrol element." "And this is the thing that affects the performance of the ski." "What you're seeing here is four piezoelectric elements, encapsulated in a protective skin, that's got the circuitry embedded in it." "And it's about the size of a large credit card." "And this is the, the device that actually is taking vibration energy turning it into electrical energy and getting rid of it." "Once fitted to a ski, the controller worked as a damper absorbing vibration." "But Ken had to fiind out how it would work in action." "We need to figure out exactly where to put the damper, how much damper we needed and how to tune it to the right vibration frequencies." "You've got to figure out exactly how the ski behaves when you're on the slope, so what we need to do is take the lab and bring it to the slope." "The test ski had to monitor the piezo effect on the move." "A cable was connected to the ski to record the data." "Well, the idea is to eliminate all the, the bad impacts and vibrations." "Actually some of the vibrations in the ski are good." "But we want to get rid of all the ones that we don't like, all the ones that cause fatigue and injury, and all the ones that cause you to lose performance." "Cutting the turns tight." "We've got one tight." "Here's a right, tight." "And then a left tight coming and then a right tight coming." "And then another left tight coming and a right tight." "And, now we're going to cut it as far as we can on that right turn there when we're done." "We're on number one." "Today piezo controllers are working inside some of the top selling skis in the U.S." "Ken is now developing piezo devices for other sports, where repeated impacts also cause injury." "Hardly anything suffers the effect of impact as much as airplanes." "Every time they land, they hit the ground with huge force." "The older the plane, the more these repeated impacts can increase the risk of an accident." "In 1989, a DC-10 crash-landed at Sioux City, Iowa." "Miraculously, 184 people survived." "He was maneuvering it by keeping it on one side or the other, yeah." "Is there any indication as to what might have caused that explosion?" "Excuse me, a question?" "Not at all, I have no idea they didn't tell us, they never told us that we lost the second engine either, we didn't fiind that out until we had landed, if you call that landing." "This crash became inevitable when a tiny piece of worn out engine broke loose and shot through the skin of the plane's fuselage cutting control lines." "Scientists are looking for a new material to make the fuselage tough enough to survive that sort of impact." "It needs to be super strong lightweight and flexible." "At SRI Poulter Labs in California, scientists began the search by looking at bulletproof materials like Kevlar and Spectra." "But Dr. Don Shockey thought this job needed something even stronger." "We had some inside information on a new advanced polymer and we tested that out and found it about twice as good as Kevlar and Spectra and a whopping 13 times better than aluminum fuselage skin." "This material's called Zylon." "Zylon is an advanced high strength polymer." "Polymers are all around us that's what you, your clothes are made out of and what plastics are made out of." "Computer simulations of the new material looked good." "These virtual tests show the spider's web of Zylon catching flying debris by absorbing energy." "The next test used actual fragments both blunt and sharp." "These are forced into the Zylon to see if it will give way." "We use a video camera, which is we zoomed in at a high enough resolution, so that we can observe individual yarns as they break." "Also each yarn is composed of three or 400 fibers and we can actually see the fibers breaking if we zoom in close enough." "The material is put through its paces" "It's got to be good enough to save air passengers' lives." "To fiind the breaking point the scientists recreate an impact in slow motion, destroying the material fiber by fiber." "They measure." "They watch." "They listen." "The louder and sharper the sound the more yarns are breaking at once and that means there's a weakness in the material." "The secret of real strength is for the thousands of yarns in a thread to break one by one." "That's what soaks up impact." "The next test is for high-speed impact." "We have guns that are, accelerate large fragments to high speeds." "And we have instrumentation at the end that shows how fast the fragment is coming when it hits the target, and how fast it's going when it leaves the target." "And in that way we get a measure of the kinetic energy absorbed by the, by the target." "The gun test proved that Zylon really is strong enough to make aircraft skins much safer." "And with the computer tests it showed the material works even better if it's held loosely against the fuselage." "Soon, it'll be available to the manufacturers." "It's gratifying and it's a little different than what we usually do." "Most of us work in basic research projects, where the application isn't immediate." "In this particular case we'll be able to see the fruits of our labor out in the sky very quickly." "Constant buffeting in the air and the multiple impacts of take off and landing cause another serious problem in airplanes, metal fatigue." "In 1988, an Aloha Airlines 737 lost a section of its roof in mid-air over Hawaii." "A flight attendant was sucked out in the violent decompression." "This aging jetliner had made nearly 90,000 flights when a tiny fatigue crack became a four-yard split, which led to the terrifying accident." "Airplanes need to be able to survive thousands of landing impacts without suffering metal fatigue." "They need new materials that will do away with the kind of weaknesses that cause disasters like the Aloha accident." "The aerospace department at the University of Delft in Holland, specializes in laminates." "These materials are strong because they're made in layers." "The department's most promising breakthrough is a new substance called Glare." "Glare is made from layers of glass fiber in between thin sheets of the traditional airplane building material, aluminum." "Glare has been nursed through the testing process by its inventor," "Professor Boud Vogelesang." "The difference between a conventional structure, laminated structure and Glare are the glass fiber layers in between the aluminum sheets." "We have to be sure that the quality of these sheets are are, are perfect so we have to inspect these sheets." "Well, this is our quality control system in which we investigate the inside of the material, just like in the hospitals we look for the embryo in the belly of the mother, it's the same technique we use here for, for quality control," "looking for defects inside the Glare sheets." "This ultra sound image shows in pink any air bubbles that might weaken the Glare during landings." "This test specimen is no good." "After the inspection we make specimens out of it and then we start testing those specimens." "The aircraft manufactures won't buy Glare unless the professor can prove it will stand up to the day-to-day rigors of flying." "First a test, copying the effects of landing and take-off, where the Glare is pulled apart by a force three times greater than the stress it will actually experience in flight." "Next, the impact of a large ice ball at 200 miles an hour makes a slight dent." "And to copy the everyday accidents that can happen during maintenance, a tool is dropped onto the Glare from 40 feet up." "Again, there's no serious damage." "The product is good enough to attract the interest of the giant European aircraft consortium, Airbus Industries." "Their airplane of the future the massive 600-seat double-decker A3 XX, needs a strong lightweight material to keep it at the leading edge of design." "Glare could be the answer." "Huge panels of Glare would form the luxurious passenger cabin." "Airplane manufacturer, Faulker have made the largest single fuselage panel in history and it's all Glare." "Panels use an innovative layering technique that eliminates most of the rivets used in aluminum planes." "This makes for fewer stress points." "For the fiinal test, the professor put a full size panel of glare through a realistic stress test." "This is a full-scale fuselage structure of the Airbus AC340." "This specimen is tested in the laboratory with a flight simulation test so fairly realistic tests, with the internal pressure of the cabin and also bending and torsion on the fuselage." "The point of the flight simulation test is to keep stressing a panel of Glare until it cracks from fatigue." "And how dangerous a long fatigue defect can be is demonstrated by the Aloha accident." "The Aloha plane was made of conventional aluminum." "Stressed by the thousands of daily impacts of flying, a small crack grew into a catastrophe." "That's what we call damage intolerant behavior." "For the fiinal test on Glare, the start of a crack was made in a pressurized hull to see if it would rip and explode." "As the fuselage was stressed the crack grew, but only by a few inches." "The Glare stopped it from spreading." "The Professor had to make another saw cut to start it off again." "Once more it grew a couple of inches and then stopped." "In traditional aluminum the crack would have carried on and become far worse, but Glare's glass fiber layers were stopping it in its tracks." "And we did it one, two, three four, five times." "In fact we were not able to to make that explosive failure." "This, this was the damage the ultimate damage." "But with this damage the aircraft is able to make a safe landing." "So this demonstrates the extremely damage tolerant behavior of this material compared to the conventional structure a very safe behavior." "Airplanes are getting bigger and they're flying further and more often." "They've got to be built from materials that are light and fantastically strong." "It looks good in stress tests, but whether Glare takes off depends on cost as well as quality." "Flying further afield, space presents the biggest impact challenge yet." "At first glance, the space between the stars and planets looks empty." "In reality it's full of debris, from meteorites to tiny specks of dust, whizzing through space faster than bullets." "Most of the debris is left over from the Big Bang, the explosive start of the universe, and the purest examples of it are found in comets." "Comets are the left over bits of the solar system." "They are the remnants the left over bits, the bit from the beginning of time as it were for our soar system." "Scientists believe that by studying the material in comets, they will be able to answer questions about the origins of the universe." "Particles in space travel at around 35,000 miles per hour, so up to now it's been impossible to catch them." "As soon as space particles hit something, they just vaporize." "If you were to leave something in space it's peppered every day, certain time scales of years by very small pieces of dust which will just leave little craters and cracks on the surface." "This is what happens to a spacecraft when it comes across a pea-sized particle." "The vehicle is wrecked and the particle, obliterated." "So you have to fiind a way of capturing these objects, so you can bring them back to earth and study them." "This is the answer." "Its called Aerogel." "Nicknamed frozen smoke it is the world's lightest solid." "A slab the size of a human will weigh less than a pound, but can support the weight of a car." "Scientists thought Aerogel's unique properties might allow it to catch space dust without causing mutual destruction." "To see how it would perform in space," "Aerogel was stress tested on the Russian space station Mir." "They took a slab and left it outside the station for two weeks." "It made for an interesting catch." "The particles didn't vaporize as they hit the Aerogel." "Instead, they burrowed their way in, and stayed there." "The space around Mir was full of man made leftovers from space missions, as well as cosmic dust." "You fiind, oh there's a paint fleck trapped in it." "Or there's a bit of human waste trapped in it." "Or there's a piece of mineral something which was a micrometeorite coming from interplanetary space, which struck your Aerogel." "Four, three, two, we have main engine start, zero and lift off of the Stardust spacecraft returning a times capsule with the elements of the formation of our solar system." "Aerogel did so well on Mir that N ASA has launched a special mission called Stardust." "Its aim is to use Aerogel out in deep space to catch the stuff of comets." "The comet tail the Aerogel will fly through is called Wild-2." "The gel is expected to collect more than a thousand minute particles." "If we ever fiind the dust which is interstellar dust grains bring them back to earth, we will know what's out there between the stars and no one's done that yet." "That will be a very exciting first." "Aerogel began as an impact absorbing material with strange properties." "It has become a key element in our search to gather evidence, which will help us understand the origins of the universe." "Back on earth, there are far more deadly cargoes, which have to be protected from impact at all costs." "On this truck, is a container full of nuclear waste." "The waste has been sealed into a 50-ton container forged from a single lump of steel." "This heavy-duty piece of engineering needs to survive the most violent impact, because this nuclear waste is transported on public railroad tracks." "In response to genuine public concern, nuclear waste transporters in the U.K. Ran a stress test to fiind out what would happen if the container was struck at full speed by a train." "They called it Operation Smash Hit." "The container was put across a rail track and a driverless locomotive with three carriages set off on a collision course." "The train would reach 100 miles per hour before impact." "When the scientists came to check the wreckage, the result was declared a resounding success." "Scarred and buckled the container had survived." "It worked." "And nuclear waste is now routinely carried on the railroads." "In the US, over forty thousand people a year are killed in car crashes." "In fact, your biggest chances of being injured or killed is either in or by a car." "Not surprisingly, safer cars have become a major public priority." "A lot of time and money has been spent on impact research, but are the stress tests working?" "Road accidents are the biggest cause of accidental death and injury." "We are talking about more than one accident happening every second worldwide." "For manufacturers to design safer cars, they must test precisely what happens in a crash." "At the Transport Research Lab in England, they've been testing cars for 50 years." "It's become an exact science." "They're currently crashing their way through the top selling vehicles in Europe." "Cars are given a star rating of one to five based on their performance in frontal and side impact tests." "If you are publishing the results of the performance of one car compared with another car, you must be able to demonstrate that every car has been treated fairly." "So by getting everything as precisely the same in each test as you can, then you reduce the likelihood that the manufacturer will say," ""Well, I think that my car was tested slightly differently from another one and that's why I got a worse performance than I should."" "Today's test will be a head on collision." "Engineers from the manufacturers are there to keep an eye on their baby and check every detail of the test preparations." "Okay?" "Okay." "Thank you." "The star of the crash test is of course, the dummy." "Dummies are wired so at the moment of impact, 79 channels of data will be sent to the onboard recorder." "The crash dummies are the closest technology can get to the human body." "They weigh the same and they've been fitted with life-like joints." "All right, it still looks a bit tilted out towards you." "These tests are really good at telling us what happens to the outsides of our bodies in a crash." "But we also need to know what damage occurs to internal organs." "The only way to get this information is from autopsy data from actual crash victims." "Information from thousands of impact tests, as well as real accidents, has had a major effect on car design." "The optimum must be where we get rid of all the aggressive interior impacts and we have all the injuries or most of the injuries coming from the seatbelts themselves and the airbags and we can minimize the effects of those." "The test car is rolled out to a temperature-controlled tent, as all impacts must be done under exactly the same conditions." "When it comes to the time of the test the car can be taken pulled by the cable up along the track and then into the crash test facility where the impact takes place." "The dummies in today's tests represent an eighteen-month-old baby, a three-year-old child and two adults." "Impact likely areas on their faces are painted just before the test is to happen." "When the dummies' heads collide with the airbags or back seats, they will leave wet paint marks as evidence." "Turn the lights on now and if you can..." "Five hours of preparation have a climax lasting less than a second." "Once the data from the computers and the 27 cameras has been analyzed, it will be directly compared with the other tests in the car's class." "At the end of the day, this car earned three stars out of a possible five." "If a design gets top marks in the test, the marketing team wants to know about it." "These days, safety sells." "Oh, can't you look where you are going?" "It just came out of nowhere." "It just came out of nowhere." "We've now seen Renault because they have had very good results with the Megane and the Espace starting to advertise that." "And other car manufactures will be increasingly using that in their advertising in the future." "Conditions may be getting safer for drivers and passengers, but the street remains a dangerous place to be." "Over 5,000 pedestrians are killed by cars every year." "Front impact testing for pedestrian protection is just getting underway." "All it now requires is legislation." "The consumer has to say" ""I want to have pedestrian protection on my car."" "We're all pedestrians." "So we all have that risk, but at the moment that's being resisted." "It's a major problem for example, in New York." "But there is no work currently going on in the United States for pedestrian protection." "There was certainly considerable pressure for that work not to be done." "Public pressure has forced auto manufacturers to make cars safer for passengers, now it's the turn of the pedestrian." "Scientists are understanding more and more about the causes and effects of impact." "And as they do, impact will play a less and less destructive role in all our lives."