SAFE INC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N162-096

Description

The Navy requires a life raft that is small and light enough to include with the body-worn survival ensemble. Having a pocket-sized raft at hand helps facilitate successful egress, inflation, and boarding. The required 12 cubic inches of stowed volume is a significant challenge, considering that a typical one-person raft compacts to about 700 cubic inches under vacuum. Safe, Inc. (Safe) has proposed a raft with innovative features to help meet this extreme volume reduction. The raft will be made of material between 1 and 2 thousandths of an inch thick, a reduction of 2 to 4 times compared to conventional raft materials, while retaining sufficient strength and ability to heat seal the seams. The inflator will aspirate outside air into the raft through the Bernoulli effect at a ratio of 12 to 1 to dramatically reduce the volume of gas that must be stored for automatic inflation. The raft will be compressed at high pressure to minimize its packed volume prior to vacuum sealing. Safes project team includes a commercial raft manufacturer with practical experience designing and building rafts and their manufacturing tooling. Safes commercialization strategy assures flexibility to address both military and commercial markets.