Creo Customer: Fighting Fire with Engineering

By LINDSEY CHRISTENSEN | Published: JAN 17, 2012

What do firefighting, plane de-icing, and nacho chips have in common? Nozzles. From fighting fires to spraying your favorite chips with cheese, nozzle design is essential to the process. However, firefighting presents the most variable factors in nozzle use because water pressure at each fire scene is different. Flames can burn people and equipment if water pressure decreases for even a few seconds.

That’s why a dependable nozzle design is vital to firefighters.

Fire hoses can exert a powerful 350 gallons per minute. Firemen need a steady flow of water through the nozzle to maintain a safe distance from the fire and extinguish it. A good nozzle design regulates the velocity and flowrate of water for each fire scene.

Akron has been designing fire equipment since 1918. They design hundreds of nozzles for uses such as fighting wildfires and structural fires, plane de-icing, Aircraft Rescue Fire Fighting as well as marine and industrial applications. The Designers at Akron approached the problem of varying water pressures through changing the baffle design and creating an interchangeable solution so firefighters can match the nozzle to each unique fire. In the past, designing a nozzle with interchangeable parts would have required designing, producing, and testing each prototype – a long, lengthy, and expensive process.

Using Creo, the lengthy four-stage process became one.

Akron designed the nozzle in Creo and imported it into a fluid dynamics program to achieve the best desired stream quality. In this episode of the Product Design Show, you’ll learn more about the design challenges with the “Assault” nozzle and its final outcome: a light, fine-tuned, and efficient instrument.