INDUSTRIAL SAFETY

IMPROVING WORKING CONDITIONS FOR EQUIPMENT OPERATORS

B. I. Taftevich and O. R. Shilovitskii

The increase in automation at plants has been accompanied by an increase in the number of workers who remotely operate production equipment. The working conditions of the operators, in turn, has a direct impact on their health, labor productivity, product quality, the condition of the equipment, and adherence to safety regulations in shops.

In regard to safety, a key prerequisite is ensuring that the production equipment in the shop and the control and instrument panels in the operator's cab are all readily visible.

An inspection of all control posts in the main shops at the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Combine and a question- naire circulated among operators showed that visibility was impaired in 63% of all cases: poor visibility of production equipment in the shops; poor illumination of enclosed areas in the shop; momentary blinding of operators by incandes- cent metal, lights, and windows in their field of view; darkness or, conversely, overly bright illumination in the cab; improper location of instrument scales and television monitors in the cab; poor design of cab windows.

It was found that inadequate attention is given to ensuring good visibility in equipment cabs, even though this is just as important as protecting the operators from noise or excessive heat.

In the reconstruction of equipment cabs, it is recommended that the following measures be implemented to provide for good operator visibility:

- - determination of the dimensions and location of viewing windows in cabs in strict accordance with the fields of view of the production equipment and surrounding areas required for safety pruposes. The most important objects should be located within sectors bounded by angles of -+30* in the horizontal and vertical planes;

- - use of combination artificial lighting in the cabs: general lighting (lights with fluorescent lamps built into the ceiling parallel to the control panel) and local lighting (lights located on brackets above the instrument panels). The lights must be located so as to not cause reflections from the windows in the field of view of the operator;

- - placement of deflectors outside the cab above the windows, the dimensions and inclination of the deflectors being such as to shield the operator from bright lights and solar radiation entering through windows and skylights;

-- emphasis of the illumination of the production equipment being controlled by the operator. Along with horizontal illumination (the levels of which are dictated by sanitary-hygienic regulations), it is necessary that adequate vertical illumination be provided for the work station, since the operator views the equipment from the side. It should be most expedient to install floodlights that could be turned on by the operator when needed. Of course, these lights should not shine on other workers in the shop or on transport equipment. Such lighting helps alleviate the blinding effect of the red-hot metal without significantly increasing energy consumption.

Past reconstruction of the control posts in several shops at the Magnitogorsk combine has shown that good visibility for equipment operators can be provided when the above requirements are met.

Magnitogorsk Mining-Metallurgical Institute. Translated from Metallurg, No. 3, pp. 27-28, March, 1989.

0026-0894/89/0304-0057512.50 �9 Plenum Publishing Corporation 57