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Helicopter Aircrew Integrated Life Support System Neck Seal

The HAILSS was designed as an integrated garment that comprises a flight suit exterior, a survival/dry suit for accident protection and an air transport layer to provide forced cooling.  The application of polymer hydrogels was aimed at developing a neck seal for the HAILSS that would be comfortable to wear, allow airflow that would enable the installation of a cooling system, and be instantaneously activated in the event of submersion to provide a watertight seal that prevents flooding of the dry suit, even in cases where the wearer may be unconscious.

This extremely fast track project produced outstanding results and a patent pending technology.  Our prototypes, tested on a series of human subjects in the ocean, have been able to react quickly enough, when submerged, to limit the volume of water ingress to tablespoons while sealing around the irregular concave and convex geometry of the neck.  This success is the result of a combination of good design and specialized development of fast swelling polymers that function in salt- as well as fresh water.  In the course of development attention was paid to cost, manufacturing, and maintenance issues, and a modular solution was proposed that will be inexpensive to produce and operate.

The neck seal consists of two parts.  One is the seal itself and the other is the actuator.  The seal was designed to be a permanent part of the HAILSS ensemble, while the polymer actuator is an inexpensive disposable part.  This approach makes the substitution of faulty actuators cheap and easy, while significantly simplifying the laundering process by allowing the removal of the actuator pack.  This device is easily applied to wetsuits to limit the ingress of water in the notoriously leaky neck and back areas, as well as commercially available survival suits.

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	HAILSS neck seal prototype ready for installation into dry suit.
	HAILSS neck seal as designed to fit.
	Initial prototype testing by human subjects.