Design and analysis of uptilted aerial ladder for fire truck format

Aerial ladder fire truck is a kind of fire-fighting truck which is used for rescue of people and goods from high altitude locations. The aerial ladders of the fire truck are typically nested U-shaped truss structures manufactured with thin-walled steel by welding. Compared with close-shaped truss structures, their stiffnesses are relatively low. This means that they are quite slender structures, and they will deflect quite significantly due to their own weight and the working loads applied. If the original design of the ladder is straight, then the ladder will deform to a ‘fishing-rod’ shape in the air. The consequent ‘bent-down’ shape of the deformed ladder causes significant inconvenience during rescuing operations. To deal with this issue, a practical solution to the problem is that the ladder is manufactured with an appropriate uptilted curved shape, and it could deform to an approximately straight ladder when it is under certain desired working condition. In this paper, the effectiveness of the curved ladder design proposed in this paper has been validated by both finite element analysis and experimental results.