Distrupol’s materials knowledge helps deliver wheelchair innovation for young people

With its latest contribution to new product development, Distrupol has once again demonstrated the support behind its ‘knowledge that delivers’ promise to customers. This support was clearly shown with the development of the highly innovative Chunc® wheelchair for disabled children and young people. From the outset, the Chunc was conceived as a modular design, utilising injection moulding, and allowing for it to adapt to the child’s needs as he or she grows into their teens. The Chunc Wheelchair brings a new level of user-comfort, no matter what the level of need or stage of growth of the child, together with easy handling by carers.

The Chunc project was led by Specmat Ltd, a member of the UK-based H R Smith Group of Companies specialising in aerospace equipment, and was initiated by Richard Smith, the Group’s Managing Director. In seeking a solution for the mobility needs of his daughter, he discovered that many other parents and carers faced a similar problem of finding a wheelchair that combined good postural management with easy handling indoors and outdoors, as well as simple loading and unloading from vehicles.

Mr. Smith tasked Specmat’s industrial design engineers to develop a workable concept that brought together these often mutually exclusive characteristics. “It became clear to me that children’s wheelchairs all look the same because they were based on designs that had changed little over the past 100 years”, Richard Smith explains.

“Wheelchair manufacturers were not investing in their own products and if you’re not prepared to make a financial commitment your design will always be compromised. So we decided to break away from standard materials and outdated designs. By adopting polymers and investing in injection moulding tools and specialised custom extrusions, we came up with something totally original”, he adds.

Involved from the outset, Distrupol assisted with the selection of a material that met the design criteria for the structural parts of the wheelchair. This included the wheel forks, legs, handles, footplates, locking nuts and supports. The material chosen was injection mouldable Zytel® 80G14, a glass reinforced and impact modified PA 66 from DuPont. This grade brought the unique balance of structural stiffness and impact toughness required for these demanding components, complemented by its excellent colourability and the ease with which the material could be processed over some particularly challenging flow paths.

In addition to its materials expertise, Distrupol supported the customer in part production and provided assistance with optimising the injection moulding processes, thus ensuring maximum product performance. Moreover, through Distrupol Colour, Distrupol’s dedicated colour compounding facility, the company produced the special, small lot, ‘funky’ fluorescent coloured compounds, fundamental to Chunc’s styling concept. This allows kids to feel part of the modern scene, rather than separating them from it as the ‘old style’ wheelchairs have done in the past.

Distrupol is continuing to work with Specmat to bring further improvements to product range, performance, and functionality, as well as contributing additional metal replacement ideas. For more details about the Chunc wheelchair, please visit www.chunc.com.