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safety by design


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	Airfence bike


	The joints of Airfence Bike modules now have 6 seat belt/Stainless steel D ring strap assemblies which are easy to fasten/undo and supremely strong.The 3 front straps are covered by the velcroed flap.

Airfence Bike - Safety by design

Construction of Airfence Bike is out of the highest quality and strength, reinforced PVC fabrics which are fire retardant and highly UV stabilized. The frame uses high density, polyurethane, open cell foam. Like Airfence IIs, Airfence Bike is fundamentally an air cell, using ambient air to absorb impact. The foam creates the frame, defining the air cell while the cover provides the integral strength of the air cell. Each module is 2 metres long by 1.2 metres high and 1 metre deep with moduleslocked together by seat belt webbing to form a continuous and seamless safety barrier of any desired length.

Impact
The frame and the air cell work together to absorb the impact. The stiffness of the frame combines with increasing air pressure as the barrier is impacted, to provide increasing resistance to a penetrating body. So the barrier is soft at low impact speeds, but increasingly hard at high speeds as the air pressure takes over the primary impact absorbing role.

To ensure that the pressure (and hardness) does not become too great, the barrier can open exhaust holes to control the pressure. This allows absorption and dissipation of the energy and also minimizing rebound. Because high speed impact happens over a very short duration, Airfence Bike is able to sustain high speed impacts without full penetration while feeling soft to touch. It also ensures that the rate of deceleration does not increase too quickly, changing the forces on the human body too rapidly.

The joints
between modules have come in for particular attention:

The modules are flush jointed, there is no gap

Six stainless steel "Dee Ring" couplings with seat belt webbing are used to join the modules which have been chosen for their strength, ease of use and safety if impacted. They are double secured with hook and loop fastening and so have no opportunity to slip or break.

The flap at the front ensures a continuous barrier along the face and no penetration between the barriers.

The foam frames of the barriers have been designed to always fold into one another so that a gap between the modules and consequent collapse under impact cannot occur.