Open Cut » Maintenance & Equipment
Operators of earth moving equipment are known to be exposed to significant whole-body vibration amplitudes, which are are transmitted to the operator through the equipment seat. Prolonged exposure to high amplitude whole body vibration causes serious long term health effects, particularly back disorders. Workplace management of the risks associated with this hazard requires assessment of vibration amplitudes before implementing appropriate control measures.
A previous project (C23022) successfully demonstrated a cost-effective means of measuring whole-body vibration at surface coal mines utilising an iOS application WBV to enable extensive long-duration measurements of surface coal mining equipment. Dozers in particular were observed to be associated with whole-body vibration amplitudes that exceeded the upper limit of the Health Guidance Caution Zone defined by ISO2631.1. This earlier project demonstrated the potential to provide continuous collection of whole shift data from earth moving equipment in normal operation at surface coal mines by further developing the iOS application in conjunction with new server software.
An innovative passive suspension system has been successfully tested in lab-based experiments recreating vertical vibration exposures from several different types of commercial vehicles and in a field-based experiment evaluating an on-road truck application. The novel seat suspension design appeared to have the potential to substantially reduce dozer operator exposure to whole-body vibration. This technology along with data collected in previous projects, was used to develop a prototype seat tuned to the specific vibration attenuation requirements of dozers.
An independent evaluation of the performance of the seat in real time mine operation was attempted but was not achieved.