Industrial
Ever increasing pressure for manufacturers and operators of Industrial vehicles to come up with solutions to increase worker safety, reduce the dangerous levels of WBV (whole body vibration) and increase the time a machine operator can safely stay at the wheel of a vehicle, all combining to save millions of pounds in medical liability cases, insurance premiums, and a reduction in lost man hours on site. Over 5 million working days are lost each year through back pain caused or made worse by work in the UK alone. Increasingly common liability claims of back injury through poor seating, have given rise to a chain of successful claims against employers totaling millions of pounds and rising.
The effects of WBV are very wide ranging, from fatigue so reducing worker effectiveness to serious disablement resulting in the employee being forced onto long term sick.
Presently in certain vehicles the only way of limiting the effects of WBV has been through the development and implementation of suspension seating. In certain applications, suspension seating causes practicality issues due to confined spaces required to fit a suspension seat with enough travel to offer the levels of protection to the operator.
Suspension seating is very effective in dealing with dangerous shock and vibration within the limits of its stroke, but has a serious drawback when the road conditions or weight of the driver forces the suspension seat out of its limits. When the suspension exceeds its limits of stroke, the seat will “bottom out”. This is when the suspension seat looses any beneficial protection and in many cases has a detrimental effect, by “spiking” shock through the seat straight to the occupant.
The “bottom out” problem with suspension seating is not just limited to industrial vehicles but all forms of transport were suspension seats can be found. The greater the shock and vibration, the more stroke needed, the greater the effects of bottom out when the seat exceed its limits.
What if there was a simple yet effective solution to these problems, making the whole supply chain, from manufacturing and maintenance to end user, more cost effective.
Our Pnu-Era Adaptive Seat Structures can be seen as a suspension seat cushion for certain applications or as a secondary suspension stroke for longer stroke suspension seats that have a likelihood of bottoming out due to excess driver weight and extreme road conditions. This feature, we see as negating the negative effects of bottom out and offering an additional level of occupant protection that has until now not been available to manufacturers of suspension or conventional foam seating.
As our seat structures are extremely driver weight tolerant and a fraction the cost of a suspension seat, we see our seat structures as a major technological step forward in vehicle seat technology. We can now offer more vehicle operators, greater levels of protection, more of the time.