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Human walks carefully when the ground dynamic coefficient of friction drops below 0.41

journal contribution
posted on 2016-04-26, 11:18 authored by Daniel FongDaniel Fong, Youlian Hong, Jing-Xian Li
This study investigated the available and utilized friction during non-slip gait in level walking, and determined the limit which human starts to walk carefully to adapt to slippery surface. Sixteen floor-footwear-contaminant conditions with different slipperiness (dynamic coefficient of friction, DCOF, from 0.11 to 1.06) were employed. Fifteen harnessed Chinese male performed ten self-paced walking trials in each condition without slips. The utilized friction (COFu) was obtained from the maximum value of shear to normal ground reaction force ratio during the first 25% stance. ANOVA and Tukey tests showed three subsets with similar COFu, and confirmed the hypothesis that the utilized friction drops gradually when the available friction drops below a certain critical limit. Non-linear regression models were applied to the data to determine the COFu to be 0.20 and the limit of available ground friction which human starts to walk carefully to adapt to slippery surface (DCOFlimit) to be 0.41. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Funding

This study was financially supported by the Hong Kong Occupational Safety and Health Council.

History

School

  • Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences

Published in

Safety Science

Volume

47

Issue

10

Pages

1429 - 1433

Citation

FONG, D.T-P., HONG, Y. and LI, J-X., 2009. Human walks carefully when the ground dynamic coefficient of friction drops below 0.41. Safety Science, 47(10), pp. 1429-1433.

Publisher

© Elsevier

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2009

Notes

This paper is in closed access.

ISSN

0925-7535

Language

  • en