SIUE students use senior project to aid Edwardsville Fire Department
Shown are SIUE senior project students with Edwardsville Fire Department personnel. (Courtesy City of Edwardsville)
A collaboration between a team of mechanical engineering students and the Edwardsville Fire Department yielded some “reel” results — as in an improved hose reel design that will save time while also avoid strain and potential injury for the firefighters.
The four Southern Illinois University Edwardsville students demonstrated the completed project this month at the Edwardsville Fire Department headquarters on South Main Street. The team included Kerianna Cruz-Logan of Edwardsville, Ta’mya Cummings of St. Louis, Ezekiel Gray of Carlinville and Erric Moore of Mascoutah.
Deputy Chief Robert Morgan said the manual hose roller’s original design was “hard to crank, and put a lot of stress on a firefighter’s back and shoulders” given the weight and length of the industrial hoses. “The manual version really wasn’t as useful as we would hope it would be.”
The students began working on the improved hose reel design in January to fulfill a design project requirement for their two-semester senior mechanical engineering course. The idea arose pretty naturally for one of the students, Kerianna Cruz-Logan, whose father is Joey Cruz, a lieutenant with the department.
“I’ve been up at the firehouse for quite a while, all my life basically,” she said. “I came to the firehouse and pretty much just asked what could be updated or optimized that would help with safety or time to make their lives easier.”
The challenge: Turning a hand-cranked hose roller for smaller diameter hoses into an automated device that would safely, efficiently speed up the process.
“You don’t often think about firefighters having to reel up a bunch of hoses, but when you stop and think about it, that’s a lot of hoses,” student team member Ezekiel Gray said.
The students ultimately determined that a drill could serve the purpose very well, but Kerianna Cruz-Logan said there was still a fair share of computations and simulations to figure out a gear ratio “that would be large enough to handle the force that it would have on it as it rolled the hose, but small enough so the hose wouldn’t come flying off the ground.”
Lt. Joey Cruz noted that the updated version will be very helpful to the department, and cuts the time in half that it previously took to roll up these hoses.
Student and team member Erric Moore said it was a great experience working on something that can make a firefighter’s job a bit easier. “That definitely attracted me,” he said. “Being able to see a project that actually helped people, firefighters especially, to do their jobs was very attractive.”
