Research And Design Of Child Resistant Safety Mechanism For Lighter

Child Resistant safety mechanism is safety device arranged on the activation button, which makes child difficult to operate and light the lighter. A lighter commonly used at present is an electric lighter-igniter using combustible gas, such as butane gas and natrual gas, as a fuel. The lighter can be readily operated simply by pressing and ignition actuating lever or pushbutton. An unintentional operation of the actuator, such as an erroneous operation, an operation by a child, or some unintentional collision by a hard thing acting on the actuator, can easily ignite the lighter containing the combustible gas. To prevent this type of unintentional ignition, various types of gas lighters have been declared and proposed that inlcude safety mechanisms to lock the ignition lever so that the ignition lever cannot be depressed.There are above 2000 patents of Child Resistant safety mechanism now, but there is no systematical method or aprroach about Child Resistant safety mechanism until now. Lighter designer makes use of his personal design experience to design and evaluate Child Resistant safety mechanism invention, without guide of systematical and related design method. This can not meet the requirement of developoment of Chlid Resistant lighter industry. Therefore,it is necessary to know how to design Child Resistant mechanism systematically and how to evaluate the invention precisely. To solve these problems, the existing Child Resistant mechanisms are systematically analysed and classified in the dissertation, Design method and assessment method are proposed, New Child Resistant mechanisms have been designed to apply the Chinese patent.In general, the following work are completed in the dissertation:1. Design of general lighter is prerequisite to all lighter design. The dissertaion analyses how to design general lighter; does some research on the important parts of lighter and points out the design requirement of lighter-, predicts how their quality will affect the quality or satefy of lighter.2. Based on analysing the existing Child Resistant mechanism in detail, the basic kind of Child Resistant mechanism is systematically classified; design rules of Child Resistant mechanism is established; Creative design of Child Resistant mechanism are outlined; Design method of Child Resistant mechanism are proposed.3. Based on the analysing design ways and characteristics of the existing Child Resistant mechanism, 8 Child Resistant mechanisms are designed using the above methods, and the characteristics of piezoelectric lighter and metal lighter are concerned respectively.4. Assessment method is established, based on Fuzzy assessment and linearity-weighted-sum method. The assessment indexes of every class and assessment rules are presented. Every index' s weight is calculated. Finally the result of the comprehensive assessment of 8 Child Resistant mechanisms using the linearity-weighted-sum method is gained to compare and rank them.5. To protect intellecual property of the design, 2 Child Resistant mechanismsare selected to apply Chinese patents to State Intellectual Property office of P. R. C on Aug. 30th, 2002. It is done through Hangzhou Qiushi Patent Agency company The 2 patents are under examination. Patent applications of other Child Resistant mechanisms are prepared.