13-year-olds develop suit to help firefighters
Seventh graders from Be’er Tuvia have developed a special protective suit for firefighters that allows them to spend an additional 20 minutes at the fire scene without being hurt by the heat and smoke. The development led to their winning a national technological entrepreneurship competition.
“When we created the suit, we thought of the firefighters who have been fighting in the burning fire fields near Gaza vicinity in recent months,” said pupils of the regional high school in the moshav near Kiryat Malachi.
The winning pupils developed a special suit for firefighters based on those worn by astronauts and including a filtering mask, a liquid cooling system, a night-vision system and thermal imaging suited for all weather conditions.
The suit was developed by Shani Veiburt, Roni Yablonka, Ilai Biton and Niv Chen. “We were looking for ideas for adapting products from space for use in Israel... finally we decided to combine the ideas of all the members of the group, and so we came to the idea of creating a suit for firefighters,” said Veiburt and Yablonka. “We are very surprised and excited about winning the competition and hope that the fire department will adopt our model.”
The pupils are participating in a “Sky is not the Limit” course in cooperation with the Space IL association. The competition was run by the Ta’asiyada Association, which aims at strengthening the scientific and technological curiosity of students.
During the course, young teens learned about the challenges facing the engineers who are supposed to land spacecraft on the moon, as well as about the physical conditions and industrial products in space and in the international space station. Finally, pupils were challenged to adapt a product that astronauts use to everyday life on Earth.
The inventions and solutions used in the past for the space industry have quickly become the common property of all of the inhabitants of the globe in a variety of fields, including medicine, transportation, safety, computing and even nutrition. Among the inventions were dried food to which hot water is added, prosthetic organs, the insulin pump, fire detectors and fire-resistant clothing.