The next time the UAPD encounters a barricaded suspect, officers won’t have to break down doors. Instead, they will pull out a hydraulic door opener created for them by a team of University of Arizona engineering students.
The device, unveiled on May 5 at the UA Craig M. Berge Design Day Awards, is next-gen when it comes to responding to everything from hostage situations to active shooters.
A team of seven UA engineering students built the fully functional hydraulic door-breaching device for the UA Police Department. UAPD had suggested the idea as part of the annual Design Day competition to improve their arsenal.
“Right now we use three main tools to breach doors: a battering ram, a sledge hammer and a Halligan bar,” said UAPD Sgt. Joseph Berriman, the project’s sponsor. “These are very manual tools and are very heavy.”
The handheld compression device, designed to open a variety of doors, works by “gripping metal teeth onto the door frame,” said Ian Harrell, one of the engineering students on the team.
The device has a hydraulic cylinder that spreads the door frame or the locking mechanism, allowing police to open the door without force.
“The idea was for this tool to … be operable by a single officer,” Berriman said, adding that officers don’t need to have a lot of strength.
Berriman, who also heads Tucson’s regional SWAT negotiation team, said the county gets “about two to four calls a month where there is a bad guy barricaded inside a structure like a house or a building, and won’t come out.”
“Eventually we have to make an entry and this tool could be used for dynamic entry in these scenarios within Pima County,” he said.
This tool could ultimately save lives, improve officer safety and bring a transformative change to law enforcement response during active shooter events, Berriman said.
The UA engineering team started their design journey with an abbreviated breaching school training workshop from Berriman at the Southern Arizona Law Enforcement Training Center. That helped them to fully understand how police would use the tool, which aided in their design.
With just nine months to design and build the final project and a small budget of $4,500, the engineering team had to work quickly and efficiently to meet the May 5 deadline.
“The most important thing for us was team collaboration. We broke up into sub teams because our tool is multi-faceted and we had mechanical engineers, electrical engineers and systems and industrial engineers all working on different aspects of the design,” said Harrell.
The design earned the team a $1,000 prize and the IEEE Tucson Section Award for Best Use and Implementation of Engineering Standards awarded to the design that best advances technology for the benefit of humanity.
Arizona Sonoran News is a news service of the University of Arizona School of Journalism
