The following is paid content sponsored by Spartan Chassis
Eliminating preventable firefighter deaths and injuries is done through the Three E’s: Education, Enforcement and Engineering. Fire departments across the nation have stepped up how they educate firefighters on safe vehicle operations. The National Fire Protection Association, through NFPA 1901: Standard for Automotive Fire Apparatus, continues to raise the enforcement bar for fire truck safety features such as lap and shoulder belts and fully enclosed crew cabs.
Thanks to Spartan Chassis, protecting fire truck occupants responding to and returning from calls is now experiencing an unprecedented engineering advance. Spartan has not only met the bar on safety, they’ve raised it.
Going further
Spartan has broken new ground with the introduction of its revolutionary Advanced Protection System. With the APS, Spartan has reaffirmed their commitment to protecting firefighters with new technologies that take in-cab fire truck safety to a whole new level.
Yet APS is much more than just restraint belts and airbags. Consider these features of the system:
- Full side curtain airbags *Industry First
- Side impact airbag protection *Industry First
- Driver knee airbags *Industry First
- Advanced seat belts *Industry First
- Outboard sensors *Industry First
- Steering wheel mounted driver airbag
- Officer knee airbags
- Restraint control module
- Reinforced cab structure
- Electronic stability control
- Tire pressure monitoring system
- Safety lighting
Let’s get a closer look at the new features of the APS starting with the brain of the operation, the Restraint Control Module (RCM) and its outboard sensors that control multi-impact airbag deployment.
A smarter system
The system begins with sensors positioned on the cab’s outer perimeter on the driver and officer sides at the A Pillar, B Pillar and crew cab side doors. These create the aforementioned Spartan “zone of safety”.
When the fire truck is moving, these sensors continuously monitor the vehicle’s orientation relative to its environment — for example, whether the vehicle is upright as it’s moving — and send that information to the RCM.
The RCM constantly evaluates the flow of information from the sensors against a set of algorithms developed from crash-test data. When the RCM receives information that is incongruent with those algorithms, it invokes a set of “go, no go” algorithms that decide which airbags need to be deployed.
This is vastly different from competitive models, which only deploy side airbags when the fire truck rolls over. This is much like the technology on an aerial device that alarms when the operator tries to maneuver the ladder outside of its safe operating limits.
Those systems react to the fire truck’s position after the impact; Spartan’s APS reacts to the impact energy and its location on the fire truck during the collision.
Spartan recognized that injuries and deaths can occur in front and side-impact collisions as well as rollovers. Deploying side airbags is an industry first achievement, thus better protecting firefighters in the cab.
Larger, better-positioned airbags
APS uses full side-curtain airbags — another industry first — that not only protects firefighters from a side-impacts and rollovers, but also from being ejected from the cab. Each of Spartan’s rear side airbags are custom sized to cover the entire side window of every cab they build — the largest rear side airbag covers seven times more area than competing systems.
With APS, Spartan also introduced an added level of protection for the vehicle operator and officer with its frontal knee airbags that locks the lower body in place so the upper body can be slowed by the seat belts and caught by the steering wheel airbag. Front driver knee airbags is another industry first.
Here’s a scenario showing how APS works:
- Engine 57 is responding to an alarm when an inattentive driver fails to yield the right of way and T-bones the engine. It results in a significant side impact to the passenger compartment on the driver’s side; the engine does not rollover.
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In a split second, the sensors on that side begin telling the RCM about this development, while the sensors on the officer’s side are telling their side of the story.
- A component within the RCM, the accelerometer, measures the pulse of impact energy being transmitted through the vehicle’s chassis and processes that information against the “go, no go” algorithms.
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The RCM determines that the point of origin for the pulse energy being transmitted through the chassis is the driver’s side. This causes the RCM to engage the go algorithm.
- The RCM moves to the next set of algorithms and determines that the side airbags need to be deployed on the driver’s side for both the driver and the rear passenger compartment. The officer-side knee and side airbags will not deploy in this scenario.
Intelligent seat belts
The final element to Spartan’s APS is an industry-first intelligent seat-belt system that actually pulls the occupant into the seat in the event of an impact or rollover. These advanced seat belts have pyrotechnic pretensioners in the receiver/retractors rather than just the buckle.
Spartan’s rigorous crash-test studies validated that pretensioners in the receiver/retractor provide more force during the initial lock. This greater force, combined with a longer belt travel time, gives the APS belt-restraint system more capacity to pull the fire truck occupants; this is especially effective with larger firefighters.
After the firefighter is pulled into the seat, load limiters release some of the webbing to ease his or her deceleration into the airbag system. This controls the belt’s strain on the firefighter and removes pressure from the chest and torso, thus reducing restraint-belt injuries.
Spartan’s APS, when coupled with existing fire truck safety features — reinforced cab structure, electronic stability control, safety lighting and tire pressure monitoring — puts Spartan on the leading edge of engineering firefighter safety.