Recent Development in Machine Safeguarding for Protecting Humans from Complicated Machines

Abstract

As we are in twenty-first century, industries are growing at rapid rate and thus evolution of advanced and more complicated machinery takes place. Basically humans are the ones who need to operate such machinery although some of them are operated remotely, but many demand direct human interaction. Every machine has its own unique hazard such as crushing, shearing, entanglement, cutting and drawing-in which may result in mechanical injuries such as abrasion, laceration, avulsion, and others. In order to prevent such injuries and protect human from such complicated machinery, we need to discover new and advanced protective equipment’s in order to safeguard human life. This paper discusses about such recent trends in protecting humans and advance technique to provide automatic cutoff if anything goes wrong from the design intent. There are various types of guards available such as interlock guard, fixed guard, adjustable guard and use according to the type of machinery. Apart from the guards, there are different types of protective appliances we are having such as presence sensing, pullback, restraint, tripwire cable, two-hand controls and gates. All such protective devices are designed for safeguarding specific types of hazard and can be installed only on particular types of machines. Each type of guards is having its own advantages and limitations, but it shall fulfill the basic requirement of a guard-such as preventing contact between human and hazardous rotating part of machine, firmly secure machine and is difficult to tamper with, it should not create any new hazard, and must not interfere with the operation. The recent sensitive protective equipment such as trip bars, pressure mats and photoelectric devices help improve safety. In hierarchy of control, safeguarding and protective devices come under engineering control. Once the possibility to eliminate or substitution is exhausted, these protective devices are placed to protect human. Machine guarding and other protective equipment’s are placed to remove or eliminate only mechanical hazards associated with the machinery, and they can not eliminate nonmechanical hazard associated with the machine such as electricity, noise, vibration. Accidents/incidents can be prevented once workers have proper knowledge about the machine and the safeguard that is placed to protect them.