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LONDON, United Kingdom ? BoF sat down with Bec Astley Clarke only days after she was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE)?by Queen Elizabeth II for doing what was once considered impossible ? building a fully fledged luxury brand on the Internet ? and doing it with a distinctly British combination of elegance and irreverence.

Over the last seven years, Ms Astley Clarke has turned what began as a multi-brand e-tailer, selling jewellery by other designers, into a small but rapidly expanding modern British luxury brand, designing and distributing its own fine and contemporary jewellery collections, which currently account for about 70 percent of the overall business, both online and off. Astley Clarke declined to disclose exact sales figures ? annual revenues are still under ?10 million (about $15 million at current rates) ? but the business has grown by over 45 percent since last year, with sales of ?core? own-label Astley Clarke collections growing at 200 percent, year on year.

In recent months, the company has hired a professional managing director, Scott Thomson, and is ?full steam ahead? with plans to expand the business offline and internationally, in the US, Europe and China.

BoF spoke to Bec Astley Clarke, a rare fashion-tech founder whose background spans both fashion and technology, to discuss the genesis of Astley Clarke, building a luxury brand online, growing a multi-channel business, bringing in a professional chief executive and the ?just do it? attitude she inherited from her Everest-climbing father.

BoF: I hear you?ve just been awarded an MBE by the Queen for services to the jewellery industry. What did that mean to you?

BAC: Britishness is a core tenet of brand. The bits of Britishness that we celebrate are London and design and creativity and a very sort of international outlook. We have a very British tone of voice, which celebrates British wit ? so, sort of Blackadder meets Monty Python meets luxury jewellery!

We are a young brand. We?re a pretty irreverent brand. And we?re an outsider in the jewellery industry. We?re not really part of the establishment. We have an amazing picture of the Queen wearing dark sunglasses in our office next door. That?s more us. But the recognition feels really lovely. Everyone has worked so hard for the last seven years.

BoF: I?d like to go back to the very beginning. What were you doing before Astley Clarke?

BAC: My career pre-Astley Clarke was in e-commerce, online and a bit of fashion. I left university and worked with a French agency that did all the buying in London, Paris and Milan for Bergdorf?s and Lane Crawford. But I wanted to get into the nuts and bolts of business, so I joined Anderson Consulting and worked on tech projects, which were quite boring, but did give me great grounding. I worked for a number of Internet companies, then ended up at Tesco.com where I was head of online strategy.

BoF: Most fashion-tech founders come from either a fashion background or a technology background. Very few have done both.

BAC: I?ve definitely done both and it was sort of part luck and part design. I knew I wanted to start a business and I knew it had to be in e-commerce, because that?s what it?s really about from a business perspective, and I really managed to learn the bits of the puzzle: a bit of fashion, a bit of tech, a bit of commercial, a bit of operational.

BoF: Why luxury jewellery? What was the opportunity you saw?

BAC: Luxury brands, and jewellery brands in particular, were very slow to start online. And it was a really interesting business, with beautiful products. And the more I looked into it, there were a few different areas that seemed to be completely lacking in the market, online or off. One of them was design. Another one was preciousness. And the third one was colour.

A large proportion of the market, in the UK, was either Bond Street or high street. And they basically sell silver and diamonds. And it?s all very generic ? a little diamond on a little chain. That sort of struck me as odd. And the more I looked into it, I saw that men, who were once the primary purchasers of jewellery [for women], weren?t that interested in the design of women?s products, but that women were buying more and more jewellery for themselves ? you buy your Louboutin shoes, you buy your amazing handbag, you?re going to buy jewellery for yourself and you?re going to want something beautifully designed.

Then, there was the whole idea of preciousness. We have a mantra in the office: ?Go precious every day.? This is a ?5,000 pair of earrings [gestures] and most people will put them in a drawer and wear them when they go to the opera or something. And we?re like, ?No, you can wear them with jeans!? It doesn?t have to be a special occasion to pull out your jewellery. As a brand, that?s what we believe. Additionally, there were not many brands that celebrated colour. I have a personal love of coloured gemstones and I saw a real opportunity there.

So, I think there is an opportunity for a brand to try and own that space, somewhere between Bond Street and the high street, embracing all the things established jewellery brands aren?t doing: design, colour and educating people about preciousness.

BoF: So you?d identified a market opportunity. But, of course, being a founder comes with enormous pressure and expectations. It?s a personal journey, as well as a professional one. On a personal level, what convinced you to take the plunge?

BAC: I was pretty fed up with working for other people and, also, I wanted to build something. You don?t get the opportunity to actually make something that often and when you work in big organisations, you?re sort of a cog in this big chain, you don?t see the beginning and you don?t see the end.

I also come from sort of a weird family: people that all just went off and did their own thing. My dad was on the first British expedition to climb Mount Everest and my grandfather was a geneticist who discovered the cure for Rhesus negative in babies. And my mom was a doctor and psychiatrist before most women did that type of thing. Whenever I?ve said to my dad, ?Oh what do you think I should do?? even if there are a hundred million risks involved, he always said, ?You?ve got to do it, you?ve just got to do it.?

A guy called Mark Esiri ? who?s on our board of directors and was one of our initial investors ? has his own venture capital fund and, at the time, he said: ?Come and work for me, you?ll see lots of businesses and if you get an idea while you?re here and if we like it, we?ll back it.? And they did. It was like an unofficial entrepreneur-in-residence scheme.

BoF: Astley Clarke launched as a multi-brand e-tailer, selling jewellery by other designers. When did you first realise that you were actually building your own brand?

BAC: Quite early on we had our own jewellery collections but we sort of kept them under the radar. Initially, they were very plain, pearl studs or an easy amethyst necklace. Remember, I?m not a jewellery designer. But soon we realised that actually 70 percent of our search traffic was based on people typing in keywords like ?Astley Clarke.? It wasn?t like Net-a-Porter, where people were searching for brand names, like Gucci or whatever. They were searching for ?Astley Clarke.? So that made me think we?re quite good at this brand building thing.

In fact, we were quite good at two things. One was PR, looking after the press and educating the press about the market and fine jewellery. And the other was building this luxury experience on the website. And having interesting content and the right tone of voice and fantastic customer service. We made a big point of always having the telephone number on the homepage of the website and we actively welcomed people calling and interacting with the business. People seemed to engage with the brand. They liked the name, they liked the emails, they liked the tone of voice, they liked the products.

So we hired a creative director, Lorna Watson. She came from Faberg?. She?d worked across fine jewellery and more contemporary jewellery and we set about designing and making our own collections. And from day one it flew. And that sort of gave us a bit more confidence and we said, ?Ok, let?s put a little bit more behind this.? As of last year, it?s actually 70 percent of sales. I remember there was a board meeting where everyone was like, ?You?re a brand, you?re a brand.? So we said, let?s really give this the due attention it deserves. And, of course, commercially it made sense.

BoF: Unlike most offline brands, you launch new collections every week. Why this rhythm?

BAC: I think it?s a really interesting one because fine jewellers, they put their product out for the year and that?s it. But as an online business, we?ve had to run launches differently because we?ve got to keep interest and we?ve got to have people coming back. There is something about giving people newness.

For many people, jewellery purchases are associated with their engagement ring, or anniversary, or birthday. And we want our customers to see jewellery more in line with how they see other fashion items, like a new dress or a new pair of shoes.

BoF: Some say that, more than any other factor, product is the key to a successful e-commerce business. Tell me about the Astley Clarke product. What makes it special?

BAC: Our design handwriting. And our use of noble metals and coloured gemstones. But we are a young brand, so our handwriting is quite soft in the mould still. We have these pillars that run though [our designs] and that are evolving all the time. Collectability and stackability are key elements.

BoF: Why did you decide to start selling offline, first at Harrods, then at Liberty and Selfridges?

BAC: Initially it wasn?t strategic. It just happened. They came to us. As did Harvey Nichols. But ultimately, I think you?ve got to let people shop in the way they want to shop ? as a brand, we?ve got to be where customers are expecting to find us. And as a marketing tool, it?s been very valuable to have our brand in front of potential customers that don?t necessarily know us.

BoF: Do you see Astley Clarke stores?

BAC: I see an Astley Clarke store, yes. I think we will have a flagship store at some point in the future. Offline is there to welcome our customers who want to shop that way and, more than anything else, introduce people to the brand. The core of our business will always be e-commerce, but we?d like to have a flagship store in the next 18 months. Mayfair and the West End is where we would most likely be. But I don?t think we need to be on Bond Street.

BoF: What about international expansion?

BAC: We?re in the middle of looking at this as well. We?ve got the US website. And I think the East Coast of America is where most of our international customers are. And Europe. And I think China. We probably have to do web first. It?s the lowest cost entry mechanism. And then we have our engine there, set up and ready. Then we?d look at wholesale accounts and then we?d look at press launch. We probably need to do Japan. We definitely need to do Hong Kong before mainland China in terms of a physical presence.

BoF: A couple months ago, you brought in a professional managing director, Scott Thomson. How did you know it was time?

BAC: We felt, ?Ok, we?ve opened three concessions in Harrods, Selfridges, we have a US website, it?s all going really well.? But let?s really get behind it. Let?s get behind it internationally. Let?s get behind it offline. I don?t think we really have offline retailing experience, or wholesaling experience. He does. His story?s quite interesting actually. He started with a lady called Marcia Kilgore, who owned Bliss, a beauty brand that was sold to LVMH. And then she started this brand FitFlop ? you know the sandals that make you thin? Apparently, they?ve got something that tones your legs. But it went from zero to ?150 million in turnover through a big internationalisation, through big wholesale. And so we really wanted to have that expertise in house.

We?ve got to be a multi-channel brand in the places that people want to shop. And for me it was quite easy to see that I don?t have enough offline retailing or wholesaling experience to do this by myself. And I think having someone frees me up to do the bits that I?m good at ? and not the bits that I?m not good at. Operational efficiency is not my strong point. But tone of voice and brand messaging and working with our creative director are much more my strengths.

BoF: You have attracted a number of impressive investors. How did you go about choosing your investors? Other than financial backing, what have they brought to the table?

BAC: I have been good at finding good investors who bring more than just money to the table and I?m so delighted with the people that we?ve got on board. When things are good, or when things are bad, we?ve had nothing but support from them.

Mark Esiri was our first investor. And when he came on board, he brought some other people with him. Then, my ex-Tesco people invested. [At Tesco] I did a deal with a guy ? we bought his online dieting company called e-Diets and he made loads of money. So when I rang him up and said I?m setting up [Astley Clarke], he invested. And Robin and Saul Klein I had done this deal with and they invested. Then Index [Ventures] got in touch, which opened up a whole new family of people. More recently Carmen [Busquets], who came via a lady called Mimma Viglezio, a former communications director at Gucci Group who has been great, helping us with PR, helping us with product.

It?s a really nice bunch, because we have these hardcore e-commerce tech guys who know nothing about products, but they approach it from a conversion rate, traffic, stop doing affiliates, start doing this, all of that good old fashioned e-commerce stuff. And then we have people like Carmen and Mimma, who understand products and who understand brands. I think e-commerce and platforms was the differentiator ten years ago or five years ago. But now anyone can have a website. There?s no barrier to entry. But not everyone can have a brand.

BoF: Looking into the future, where do you see Astley Clarke in five years time?

BAC: We?ve got a slide: it?s a map of the world. We want to be a global luxury jewellery brand. In a similar sort of vein to what Mulberry did for handbags, I think we want to be that sort of size business, a ?200 million turnover business with some multi-currency and multi-language websites, with concession locations or wholesale locations across the world, and probably one or two flagships. I mean we have in our business plan a London one, which is a definite, and possibly one on the East Coast of America. But we?re not a store rollout business. We?re an e-commerce business using offline to build our brand.

This interview has been edited and condensed.
Source: http://www.businessoffashion.com/2013/06/founder-stories-bec-astley-clarke-on-building-a-luxury-brand-online.html
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Corporate accounting may not sound like a domain that intersects neatly with environmental metrics. While this disjuncture has been historically true, it may be undergoing a 180-degree change.

The Dow Chemical Co. and other corporate decision-makers are looking at environmental metrics as important for incorporating into corporate accounting and spreadsheets. Advocates argue that this work would provide a more complete and accurate picture of the investments and flows of natural resource inputs, as well as goods and revenues from a company over time.

This more comprehensive picture of the business realities is contingent upon introduction of new metrics of how mutually dependent business, built infrastructure and natural systems are functioning today and in the future. Once the analytical approaches are developed in the coming years, this work may well become the norm for business.

In many ways, this shift is what futurist Peter Schwartz would dub an "inevitable surprise." Dave Batker of Earth Economics asserts that we are at a fundamental inflection point in how we track and measure economic and financial "well-being" and flows. In their book "What's the Economy for Anyway?" he and co-author John de Graaf assert:

"We're not in the 20th century anymore. ... The climate is changing, with potentially disastrous consequences. Useful water is less available, while floods are increasingly prolific. Unlike in the 1930s, when roads and indoor plumbing were scarce [in the U.S. and Europe] and forests, water and wetlands were abundant, now roads [in many parts of the world] are abundant and natural systems and their services, such as flood protection, are increasingly scarce and more valuable. Yet neither our economy nor our measures of economic progress reflect these realities."

We need significant changes in what is measured and managed by both the private and public sector alike.

Dow now is trying to identify a pathway forward that can be operationalized in corporate accounting. The company and The Nature Conservancy announced a collaboration in January 2011 to help Dow and other companies recognize, value and incorporate nature into global business goals, decisions and strategies.

Forest image by Stephane Bidouze via Shutterstock.

Next page: Interdependence and profitability

Source: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2013/06/28/when-will-your-company-begin-accounting-nature

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NEW YORK (AP) ? Two 11-year-old actresses who have played orphans and been understudies in the Broadway revival of "Annie" have been picked to permanently take over from Lilla Crawford in the title role, a step up that has left them beaming.

Taylor Richardson and Sadie Sink, both natural redheads, will share the role of the stage's most famous redhead beginning July 30. Crawford's last performance will be July 28.

"It's very exciting," said Sadie, who has played Annie before but not on Broadway. "It is a big step from an orphan to the title role." That's a sentiment that her smiling co-star agrees with: "Definitely."

Taylor, an actress from Richmond, Va., and Sadie, originally from Houston, have both understudied the role of Annie, and both have gone on as the orphan Duffy. "Annie" is their Broadway debuts.

"There's a big difference between going on for one of the orphans and going on for Annie," said Taylor, who has played Annie about 80 times so far. "There's more songs, more dancing, more time being onstage that you have to be prepared for. So I guess you have to work extra-hard when you go on as Annie."

Based on the beloved comic strip that debuted in 1924, the musical is the heartwarming tale of the Depression-era orphan girl who finds happiness with a grouchy millionaire and a lovable dog.

Producers have decided that each girl will play Annie for four of the eight-shows each week. The girl not playing the title role will go on as Duffy, the biggest of the orphans who memorably stomps on Miss Hannigan's foot in Act 2.

Sadie has previously been in productions of "The Miracle Worker" and "The Secret Garden." Taylor was in a regional production of "Honk!" Both played Susan Waverly in "Irving Berlin's White Christmas" when they were 8.

Both adore musical theater and harbor dreams of one day playing either Elphaba in "Wicked" or Christine in "The Phantom of the Opera." They eat dinner together and go out for fun. When they were offered the part, they had to keep it a secret, but each would knowingly smile to each other.

Taylor has a particular tie to the part of Annie: Her grandfather was adopted by parents looking for a child with red hair. "I thought that was really cool that I had that connection once I found out," she said.

The mothers of both girls ? neither who have red hair ? are bursting with pride but shy away from taking credit for producing singing, dancing and acting prodigies.

"There are definitely some people in both sides of our family that are musically gifted and talented. I am not," said Tiffany Richardson, Taylor's mom, with a laugh. "It skipped me and went to her. I'm OK with that."

Though clearly talented, Sadie is not the first in her family to be on Broadway. One of her three older brothers, Mitchell, played a part in "Elf" this winter ? the reason Sadie came to New York. Sadie also has a younger sister with curly red hair who likes to sing.

"The red hair and the talent? I don't know," said Lori Sink, Sadie's mother.

Tiffany Richardson has already seen her daughter take center stage on Broadway as Annie, and said she and Sadie's mother will soon have a special bond. "I can't wait to share that feeling with Lori because it really is a special feeling," she said.

"Annie" first opened on Broadway in 1977 and ran for almost six years, fueled by songs including "It's the Hard-Knock Life" and "Tomorrow." A film version was released in 1982 with Aileen Quinn playing the star and a TV version came out in 1999 starring Alicia Morton.

The musical, which features music by Charles Strouse, lyrics by Martin Charnin and book by Thomas Meehan, is directed by three-time Tony winner James Lapine and choreographed by Tony winner Andy Blankenbuehler.

Crawford, who has been in the show since its first preview in October, will have played the role close to 300 times. Other actresses who have had their start in "Annie" include Sarah Jessica Parker, Molly Ringwald and Sutton Foster.

In other "Annie" news, Anthony Warlow, who has been playing Oliver Warbucks since the show began, has extended his contract with the production through Dec. 8. Faith Prince begins playing Miss Hannigan on July 19.

___

Online:

http://www.AnnieTheMusical.com

___

Mark Kennedy can be reached at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/2-leads-tapped-broadways-annie-180414639.html

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June 28, 2013 ? The comic-book hero Superman uses his X-ray vision to spot bad guys lurking behind walls and other objects. Now we could all have X-ray vision, thanks to researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Researchers have long attempted to build a device capable of seeing people through walls. However, previous efforts to develop such a system have involved the use of expensive and bulky radar technology that uses a part of the electromagnetic spectrum only available to the military.

Now a system being developed by Dina Katabi, a professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and her graduate student Fadel Adib, could give all of us the ability to spot people in different rooms using low-cost Wi-Fi technology. "We wanted to create a device that is low-power, portable and simple enough for anyone to use, to give people the ability to see through walls and closed doors," Katabi says.

The system, called "Wi-Vi," is based on a concept similar to radar and sonar imaging. But in contrast to radar and sonar, it transmits a low-power Wi-Fi signal and uses its reflections to track moving humans. It can do so even if the humans are in closed rooms or hiding behind a wall.

As a Wi-Fi signal is transmitted at a wall, a portion of the signal penetrates through it, reflecting off any humans on the other side. However, only a tiny fraction of the signal makes it through to the other room, with the rest being reflected by the wall, or by other objects. "So we had to come up with a technology that could cancel out all these other reflections, and keep only those from the moving human body," Katabi says.

Motion detector

To do this, the system uses two transmit antennas and a single receiver. The two antennas transmit almost identical signals, except that the signal from the second receiver is the inverse of the first. As a result, the two signals interfere with each other in such a way as to cancel each other out. Since any static objects that the signals hit -- including the wall -- create identical reflections, they too are cancelled out by this nulling effect.

In this way, only those reflections that change between the two signals, such as those from a moving object, arrive back at the receiver, Adib says. "So, if the person moves behind the wall, all reflections from static objects are cancelled out, and the only thing registered by the device is the moving human."

Once the system has cancelled out all of the reflections from static objects, it can then concentrate on tracking the person as he or she moves around the room. Most previous attempts to track moving targets through walls have done so using an array of spaced antennas, which each capture the signal reflected off a person moving through the environment. But this would be too expensive and bulky for use in a handheld device.

So instead Wi-Vi uses just one receiver. As the person moves through the room, his or her distance from the receiver changes, meaning the time it takes for the reflected signal to make its way back to the receiver changes too. The system then uses this information to calculate where the person is at any one time.

Possible uses in disaster recovery, personal safety, gaming

Wi-Vi, being presented at the Sigcomm conference in Hong Kong in August, could be used to help search-and-rescue teams to find survivors trapped in rubble after an earthquake, say, or to allow police officers to identify the number and movement of criminals within a building to avoid walking into an ambush.

It could also be used as a personal safety device, Katabi says: "If you are walking at night and you have the feeling that someone is following you, then you could use it to check if there is someone behind the fence or behind a corner."

The device can also detect gestures or movements by a person standing behind a wall, such as a wave of the arm, Katabi says. This would allow it to be used as a gesture-based interface for controlling lighting or appliances within the home, such as turning off the lights in another room with a wave of the arm.

Venkat Padmanabhan, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, says the possibility of using Wi-Vi as a gesture-based interface that does not require a line of sight between the user and the device itself is perhaps its most interesting application of all. "Such an interface could alter the face of gaming," he says.

Unlike today's interactive gaming devices, where users must stay in front of the console and its camera at all times, users could still interact with the system while in another room, for example. This could open up the possibility of more complex and interesting games, Katabi says.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/cHF_GAWaRds/130628092149.htm

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'Shields to Maximum, Mr. Scott'

Public release date: 27-Jun-2013
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Contact: Faith Singer-Villalobos
faith@tacc.utexas.edu
512-232-5771
University of Texas at Austin, Texas Advanced Computing Center

Researchers use TACC supercomputers to simulate orbital debris impacts on spacecraft and fragment impacts on body armor

We know it's out there, debris from 50 years of space exploration aluminum, steel, nylon, even liquid sodium from Russian satellites orbiting around the Earth and posing a danger to manned and unmanned spacecraft.

According to NASA, there are more than 21,000 pieces of 'space junk' roughly the size of a baseball (larger than 10 centimeters) in orbit, and about 500,000 pieces that are golf ball-sized (between one to 10 centimeters).

Sure, space is big, but when a piece of space junk strikes a spacecraft, the collision occurs at a velocity of 5 to 15 kilometers per secondroughly ten times faster than a speeding bullet!

"If a spacecraft is hit by orbital debris it may damage the thermal protection system," said Eric Fahrenthold, professor of mechanical engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, who studies impact dynamics both experimentally and through numerical simulations.

"Even if the impact is not on the main heat shield, it may still adversely affect the spacecraft. The thermal researchers take the results of impact research and assess the effect of a certain impact crater depth and volume on the survivability of a spacecraft during reentry," Fahrenthold said.

Only some of the collisions that may occur in low earth orbit can be reproduced in the laboratory. To determine the potential impact of fast-moving orbital debris on spacecraft and to assist NASA in the design of shielding that can withstand hypervelocity impacts Fahrenthold and his team developed a numerical algorithm that simulates the shock physics of orbital debris particles striking the layers of Kevlar, metal, and fiberglass that makes up a space vehicle's outer defenses.

Supercomputers enable researchers to investigate physical phenomenon that cannot be duplicated in the laboratory, either because they are too large, small, dangerous or in this case, too fast to reproduce with current testing technology.

Running hundreds of simulations on the Ranger, Lonestar and Stampede supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, Fahrenthold and his students have assisted NASA in the development of ballistic limit curves that predict whether a shield will be perforated when hit by a projectile of a given size and speed. NASA uses ballistic limit curves in the design and risk analysis of current and future spacecraft.

Results from some of his group's impact dynamics research were presented at the April 2013 American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics' (AIAA) meeting, and have recently been published in the journals Smart Materials and Structures and International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering. In the paper presented at the AIAA conference, they showed in detail how different characteristics of a hypervelocity collision, such as the speed, impact angle, and size of the debris, could affect the depth of the cavity produced in ceramic tile thermal protection systems.

The development of these models is not just a shot in the dark. Fahrenthold's simulations have been tested exhaustively against real-world experiments conducted by NASA, which uses light gas guns to launch 'centimeter' size projectiles at speeds up to 10 kilometers per second. The simulations are evaluated in this speed regime to insure that they accurately capture the dynamics of hypervelocity impacts.

Validated simulation methods can then be used to estimate impact damage at velocities outside the experimental range, and also to investigate detailed physics that may be difficult to capture using flash x-ray images of experiments.

The simulation framework that Fahrenthold and his team developed employs a hybrid modeling approach that captures both the fragmentation of the projectiles their tendency to break into small shards that need to be caught and the shock response of the target, which is subjected to severe thermal and mechanical loads.

"We validate our method in the velocity regime where experiments can be performed, then we run simulations at higher velocities, to estimate what we think will happen at higher velocities," Fahrenthold explained. "There are certain things you can do in simulation and certain things you can do in experiment. When they work together, that's a big advantage for the design engineer."

Back on land, Fahrenthold and graduate student Moss Shimek extended this hybrid method in order to study the impact of projectiles on body armor materials in research supported by the Office of Naval Research. The numerical technique originally developed to study impacts on spacecraft worked well for a completely different application at lower velocities, in part because some of the same materials used on spacecraft for orbital debris protection, such as Kevlar, are also used in body armor.

According to Fahrenthold, this method offers a fundamentally new way of simulating fabric impacts, which have been modeled with conventional finite element methods for more than 20 years. The model parameters used in the simulation, such as the material's strength, flexibility, and thermal properties, are provided by experimentalists. The supercomputer simulations then replicate the physics of projectile impact and yarn fracture, and capture the complex interaction of the multiple layers of a fabric protection system some fragments getting caught in the mesh of yarns, others breaking through the layers and perforating the barrier.

"Using a hybrid technique for fabric modeling works well," Fahrenthold said. "When the fabric barrier is hit at very high velocities, as in spacecraft shielding, it's a shock-type impact and the thermal properties are important as well as the mechanical ones."

Moss Shimek's dissertation research added a new wrinkle to the fabric model by representing the various weaves used in the manufacture of Kevlar and ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene (another leading protective material) barriers, including harness-satin, basket, and twill weaves. Each weave type has advantages and disadvantages when used in body armor designed to protect military and police personnel. Layering the different weaves, many believe, can provide improved protection.

Fahrenthold and Shimek (currently a post-doctoral research associate at Los Alamos National Laboratory) explored the performance of various weave types using both experiments and simulations. In the November 2012 issue of the AIAA Journal, Shimek and Fahrenthold showed that in some cases the weave type of the fabric material can greatly influence fabric barrier performance.

"Currently body armor normally uses the plain weave, but research has shown that different weaves that are more flexible might be better, for example in extremity protection," Shimek said.

Shimek and Fahrenthold used the same numerical method employed for the NASA simulations to model a series of experiments on layered Kevlar materials, showing that their simulation results were within 15 percent of the experimental outcomes.

"Future body armor designs may vary the weave type through a Kevlar stack," Shimek said. "Maybe one weave type is better at dealing with small fragments, while others perform better for larger fragments. Our results suggest that you can use simulation to assist the designer in developing a fragment barrier which can capitalize on those differences."

What can researchers learn about the layer-to-layer impact response of a fabric barrier through simulation? Can body armor be improved by varying the weave type of the many layers in a typical fabric barrier? Can simulation assist the design engineer in developing orbital debris shields that better protect spacecraft? The range of engineering design questions is endless, and computer simulations can play an important role in the 'faster, better, cheaper' development of improved impact protection systems.

"We are trying to make fundamental improvements in numerical algorithms, and validate those algorithms against experiment," Fahrenthold concluded. "This can provide improved tools for engineering design, and allow simulation-based research to contribute in areas where experiments are very difficult to do or very expensive."

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