A New Safety Design of the Ceiling Fan to Avoid Suicidal Cases

Abstract

In recent years due to heavy stress and mental depression, in many parts of the world people commit suicides and lose their lives, leaving their family and relatives. From all around the world, approximately 17% of the suicide cases that are registered from the year 1987 to 2017 are from India. Among those, hanging to death from a ceiling fan is one of the major methods of suicide. In this paper, a new safety design is proposed for ceiling fans to prevent suicidal cases. Initially, stress analysis has been done on the general existing model fans to evaluate the force exerted by its own weight of the fan on the down rod. Depending on the results, the modification to the ceiling fan will improve the design from any mishap. In this new design, the down road is replaced with a spring that connects it to the ceiling of the house. The spring is designed such that, the rigidity of the spring fails when it encounters more weight than the designed safe load. Due to rigidity failure of the spring, the spring elongates and the fan lowers down, thus preventing the person from death by hanging. The Computer-Aided Design (CAD) model of the ceiling fan is made in SolidWorks and the analysis of down rod is done in ANSYS. However, the analysis of spring assembly is done in SolidWorks.