From Andrew Jordan of Rack Protect:

Rack Armor may look like a piece of plastic tube with foam stuck in it, but the more you learn about the physics of it the more impressed you will be.

1. It's round. When you try to hit it with a fork it's difficult. The fork tends to judder on the carriage and slide away.

2. The point impact. When forks hit a solid object like rack they do a lot of damage.This is because all the weight of the truck, is concentrated into one little area, the tip of the fork. Assuming 4,000 lbs concentrated into a 6" x 1/8" Tip it equals 3,000 lbs per square inch. To give a comparison your bedroom floor is 40 lbs per square foot and above ground swimming pool is 500 lbs per square foot. So it really is a tremendous force. What Rack Armor does is un concentrate this force again. By spreading out the force over the entire length of the Hard Outer Shell, it makes a small impact spread out and lessen into a larger diffused impact. From 1/8" to 24" is a 1 to 192 diffusion ratio, or to put it another way it increases the small area by 19,000%

imagine a shovel hitting something with the pointed end. Very hard, painful and all the force is concentrated in that small lip. Now take that same shovel and hit something with the flat part, same energy and force but much less damage.

That is what Rack Armor does with impacts, it spreads them out along the surface of the outer shell making them much less harmful.

3. By bending the shell and allowing the motion to continue, it allows the impact to slow and stop. Compare a mountainside road truck run out, with the bed of gravel to the truck hitting a cement wall. With the gravel the truck continues but slowly decelerates and comes to a stop with no damage. With a cement wall, all the kinetic energy is released into metal deformation,heat and complete damage. The combination of the outer shell slowly bending and the foam absorbing is like the bed of gravel

Finally any remaining energy is absorbed into the foam. Pictures show the Rack Armor being pushed back as far as 1" on the column but not transferring the impact to the column.

Most of our documentation and testing, shows a fork impacting the Rack Armor repeatedly in the same place at a simulated 4 mph. This is not a real life situation, it is much harsher. Most real life bumps occur at 2-3 mph with a loaded pallet. Usually when the driver is trying to put away a pallet. In checking with customers who have had Rack Armor for some time they usually do not have any comments. This is because it is doing it's job 24/7. If it was not we would be hearing all manner of complaints. We have received no complaints from any of our customers, about the performance of the Rack Armor.