Wire ropes are critical components of cranes and play a crucial role in ensuring the safety and efficiency of crane operations. To extend the life of these ropes and maintain their strength and performance, it is essential to regularly lubricate them. (more…)
How far away from a hazard should you stay? Your parents or grandparents would probably have told you to stay far away, but what are you to do when a hazard is present, and you must work around or near the hazard? And what exactly is a hazard? ISO 12100 Safety of machinery – General principles for design – Risk assessment and risk reduction defines a hazard as a “potential source of harm.”
Where would a designer of a machine or product start if they wished to protect the user from a known hazard? Consensus standards are a great place to begin the quest for safety. (more…)
Machine guards can be compared to the clothes we wear every day. Indeed, they serve a very important purpose. Imagine someone leaving their home on a fine, sunny morning wearing nothing but a smile. Wonder how far they will get through the day before things start going poorly for this individual?
There will be more than a few raised eyebrows and blushes when he stops into the local Starbucks for his usual morning double-dipped and whipped, chocolaty chip with a touch of pumpkin spice cappuccino fix. Good luck with that! Probably going to leave disappointed, empty-handed, and likely wearing handcuffs. This will be the beginning of a very long, very bad day for that individual. Had he recognized the risks associated with this type of behavior, and then put forth a little effort to cover up, he would have prevented many unfavorable and possibly life-changing personal and legal problems from ever occurring!
And so it is with properly guarding a machine. Machine safeguarding helps to protect workers from preventable injuries. (more…)
Please join us in welcoming Mechanical Engineer Bob Hickman, P.E., to the WARREN family! Bob has over 30 years of manufacturing and machine design experience in production and quality-driven environments. Bob holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Clemson University.
Bob’s Areas of Expertise Include:
-Machine Safeguarding
-Machine Design
-Equipment Failure
-Mechanical Engineering
-Industrial Accident Investigation
-Codes & Standards
-Machinery & Equipment Damage Assessment
-Products Liability (more…)
Hazard, risk, and harm are terms that are used in the world of machine safeguarding. How do these words shape the concept of machine safeguarding? Let’s look a little deeper….
Hazard, which Merriam-Webster defines as a noun, lists its first meaning as a source of danger.
1: a source of danger
2a: the effect of unpredictable and unanalyzable forces in determining events : CHANCE, RISK
The adequacy of a crane’s load line to support the weight of the object being lifted is an obvious concern when evaluating a crane lifting operation. Less obvious, but often equally important, is the presence and adequacy of taglines to provide control of the load orientation.
Taglines are simply ropes or lines that are (more…)
When investigating an industrial incident, one piece of information I always ask for is the relevant P&ID’s for the process. P&ID stands for Piping and Instrumentation Diagram and is defined as “A schematic diagram of the relationship between instruments, controllers, piping, and system equipment.” A set of P&ID’s for an entire facility allows you to trace the entire manufacturing process from raw material unloading to finished product loadout, including utilities like steam, water, fuel, and air. That’s great information to have, but isn’t especially useful (more…)
In the three-part series on the CE mark, we scratched the surface of some of the requirements an equipment manufacturer must meet in order to earn this designation. Part three of the series dealt with some of the requirements for the design of a guard. One of the items for consideration with the design of a guard is the frequency that someone will need to access the area protected by the guard. If access is needed on a routine basis, often defined as more than once per shift, the guard needs to be designed to be movable instead of fixed. Movable is defined as able to be opened without the use of tools. Otherwise the frustration and time requirements of obtaining tools and removing a fixed guard will often lead to the guard being discarded. (more…)
The Safety Hierarchy states that hazards should be mitigated first by engineering controls, secondly by guarding, and lastly by warning/training. When the first two, engineering controls and guards, fail in a manufacturing setting, a chemical release could occur. A forensic chemical engineer can help determine the root cause of that failure. (more…)
Hydraulic cranes absolutely rely on the integrity of their high-pressure fluid systems for safe operation. A crane can become out of level when an outrigger cylinder leaks over time, possibly leading to a tip over. A boom can collapse if a hydraulic hose ruptures. It is not possible to absolutely prevent hydraulic cylinders from developing leaks or prevent hoses from rupturing during the life of a typical crane, therefore crane manufacturers provide load holding valves at key components to prevent these dangerous incidents. In fact, ASME B30.5, Mobile and Locomotive Cranes, requires load holding valves or equivalent devices at outrigger cylinders, boom support cylinders, and boom telescoping cylinders. (more…)
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