Every Barrier Has a Story!

             Arrestor 

In the old days, when you wanted to stop a truck you put up a piece of steel.  If you wanted to stop a bigger truck you put up more steel, an even bigger truck then even more steel, and so on.  All in all it was rather boring and not very imaginative.

We decided to try replacing all that steel with energy absorbing bands.  We designed a hollow aluminum beam with the bands inside and with heavy steel side posts set in concrete.  At the certification crash test the State Department scoffed at the notion that an aluminum beam could ever stop the 15,000 pound truck coming at it at 50 mph.  Once the dust from the crash settled, we could see that the bands acted just like the sling shots of our youth.  Not only had the truck been stopped, it was actually flung backward so far that one could walk between the barrier and the (now destroyed) truck.

With a little creative engineering we then developed a method (now patented) to anchor the bands within the barrier’s steel substructure and presto, no more above-ground steel side posts.  The result is the Arrestor, a high stopping power barrier that is essentially invisible when lowered for vehicle access.  Pretty cool eh?   

           LightFoot

A customer asked us to visit and discuss the installation of our Arrestor model barrier at their facility.  All looked good until someone mentioned a subterranean structure about 14 inches below the barrier location.  Whoops… the Arrestor requires a two foot deep excavation; it’s tough to put a two foot barrier in a one foot hole!

Further discussion revealed that a lower stopping power barrier was more than adequate for their site.  We put the Arrestor on a diet and redesigned it for K4 (rather than K12) stopping power, and this reduced the required excavation depth to 12 inches.  In other words, we made the Arrestor into a lighter rated barrier that is a foot deep, ergo… the LightFoot.  That first LightFoot now protects one of the more famous museums in the U.S. 

        B³ (B-Cube) 

We were contacted by folks at a professional sports arena about barriers to protect the facility’s entrance. 
The barriers had to block vehicles but allow pedestrians to pass through, though they also needed vehicle access once or twice a year.

When we started PRO Barrier we made a conscious decision to not produce retractable bollards, as there were already companies producing them and they are notoriously hard to maintain and keep operational.  Since neither a retractable nor permanent bollard would work for this project, we decided to design a removable bollard suitable for occasional vehicle access.  It’s simple design led us to dub it the “basic bollard barrier,”
which became the B³ (B-Cube). 

               VolarX

Some time ago we realized there is a need for a low cost, ultra-high stopping power barrier… something as simple as the ubiquitous concrete Jersey barriers used for road construction but with much greater vehicle stopping power.  How do you possibly place a Jersey barrier alongside a road and then have it quickly jump across the road to block it when a threat approaches?

We also placed a few other constraints on the design: use no hydraulics or electrical motors to operate the barrier, be able to build the barrier on-site from locally available materials to save construction time and shipping costs, be entirely above ground so no drains are required, and be able to hide the unit so a terrorist won’t know “what’s behind door number 3.”

The result is the patented VolarX (a contraction of Rolling Fortress in Latin).  It’s an active (road is open) barrier that becomes a passive road blocking barrier once activated.  The VolarX can be customized to stop pretty much anything you would like to stop, such as an explosive-laden semi traveling at high speed. 

What's next?  Stay tuned, as we have several new barriers in development.  Need a custom design? ... we do that too.