Student Designs Innovative Escalator That Is Accessible To All Users

People with impaired mobility who move around in wheelchairs, people who are transporting bulky loads and all other users will be able to travel upwards and downwards without assistance using the innovative escalator designed by Jesús Sánchez, a student at the School of Industrial and Aeronautical Engineering of Terrassa (ETSEIAT) of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC).

The new escalator design was developed for a final thesis and received awards from the College of Industrial Engineers of Catalonia and the Universia Foundation. It affords savings of energy, construction materials and installation costs.

Conventional escalators do not completely solve accessibility problems for people with impaired mobility such as people using a wheel chair, the elderly, and people with pushchairs or bulky loads. Escalators are just another obstacle that these people have to avoid, often with the help of other people, which requires a great deal of effort and wasted time. ETSEIAT student Jesús Sánchez has designed a new escalator that all users can use self-sufficiently for his final thesis, which was directed by lecturer David Huguet.

How the escalator works

Jesús Sánchez began with an initial concept that is similar to the current escalator design but on which he has made a series of outstanding innovations. Users without impaired mobility will be able to use the escalator in the same way as they use the current ones. However, when a person with impaired mobility who uses a wheelchair needs to use the escalator, he or she will press a button to make three stairs of the escalator move together vertically to form a flat platform that can accommodate the wheelchair. Once the user is on the platform with the wheelchair perfectly positioned the escalator will move until the user reaches the end. When the user leaves the escalator, the platform will convert back into three independent stairs.

Read more . . .

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Tags: accessibility problems, escalator design, escalators, Innovation, innovations, stairs, wheel chair, wheelchair

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 12th, 2009 at 10:41 am and is filed under Innovation, Science Digest / Science Daily. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.