Engineering a solution for corner collisions

8 March 2013

Engineering a solution for corner collisions

Have you ever run around a corner to find yourself face to face with someone else and no time to react? Waikato University Mechanical Engineering student Nathan Dibley spent his summer working out ways to avoid these situations with a research scholarship from the Child Injury Prevention Foundation of New Zealand.

Nathan focused his hazard investigation on primary schools, where collisions between children are common and sometimes serious. The project was Nathan’s summer work placement as part of his Bachelor of Engineering (Honours), meaning he received course credit for his research.

“As a Mechanical Engineering student I was very interested in creating a product which could be attached to the corner of a structure to give children a way of knowing when another child is coming around the corner, or forcing them to slow down,” says Nathan.

The young engineer found the most feasible option for this was a corner extension which would change the child’s path as they ran around the corner, essentially avoiding the likelihood of a collision.

After extensive research and testing, ‘Talking Posts’ were chosen as the best design. Talking Posts are a series of round fence posts which children could decorate with artwork.

“The size could be changed by the number of fence posts and children would be given an active part in keeping their school safe.”

But before this conclusion came an exciting research and development phase. Nathan spent time finding out what size to make the corner attachment by researching the average height of a primary school child and conducting simple running exercises with children to test stopping distances.

“Following this I completed additional testing, where a prototype was attached to a corner and a number of children were asked to run around the corner to test their reactions to a foam dummy. These tests were used to assess the effectiveness of two different designs; a large rectangle and a smaller circular-shaped prototype which was found to be inferior to the larger design in general, but effective in areas with space restrictions or slower foot traffic.”

As well as developing a product, Nathan was also asked to look into solutions for corner collisions in areas where space restrictions meant a corner attachment could not be used.

“I interviewed a number of school staff on their ideas for non-engineering solutions for this problem and ideas included ‘no-go zones’, education on spotting hazards, and actively looking for patterns of collision hot-spots in medical bay records.”

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