Mine Blast Protected Seating Solutions from SCHROTH

SCHROTH Safety Products (SCHROTH) has announced another major development in their line of occupant protection products.

Mine Blast Protected Seating System Solutions

SCHROTH has been designing and manufacturing seatbelt harness systems since the 1950’s and have now put over 60 years of development and crash test experience into a new patent pending mine blast protected seating solution.

Over two years of design and development work has been trialed and tested at the independent test facility of IABG in Lichtenau, Germany.  Multiple full-scale mine blast test have been carried out at the end of 2011 on the new light-weight seat systems.

The SCHROTH SU-62 (forward facing) and SU-63 (side facing) seating systems are tubular lightweight systems with a unique resettable energy absorbing (EA) system designed into the seat.  The EA design and technology comes from the years of experience SCHROTH has with energy management in seatbelt systems. 

The SCHROTH SU-62 (Forward Facing)

The SCHROTH SU-63 (Side Facing)

The design of the seat gives the occupant not only excellent protection in a mine blast event, but also offers excellent protection in the event of an accident or impact.  The All Belts to Seat (ABTS) design allows the vehicle manufacturer to optimize the installation of the seat within the hull.  An integrated foot rest can also be incorporated into the standard SU-62 seating system to further extend the range of occupant protection.

The unique SCHROTH EA technology is tunable to match the size and weight of the vehicle as well as the level of protection required and the available space within the vehicle interior.  The EA is also designed to reset itself and offer high levels of protection for the secondary (slam down) event.

The successful development and verification of the SU-62 seating system exceeded the requirements of the current AEP55 using full scale testing to the most extreme conditions.

The verification test platform (TROSS II) was prepared in order to represent maximum global accelerations with worst case loading of the protective seating system and at the most vulnerable test location. The test platform was fully instrumented with the data acquisition systems and high-speed cameras.

Part of the demanding qualification program was a test representing a 12ton vehicle with a 8kg charge of TNT under the center of the vehicle.

With the current reduction on military budgets and the ongoing pressure to increase survivability on new and existing vehicle fleets, SCHROTH has found an attractive blend of affordability and improved survivability for the years to come.

SCHROTH will be presenting the latest versions of the SU-62 (forward facing) and SU-63 (side facing) seating at the International Armoured Vehicles conference, taking place on February 21 & 22, 2012 in Farnborough UK.
Contact:  Tom Myers
Email: tom.myers@schroth.com
SCHROTH Safety Products, Arnsberg D- 59757 Germany
www.schroth.com