Abstract
Accidents due to falls from height are one of the main causes of death in workplaces. Fall arrest systems (FAS) are designed to arrest the fall safely without injuring the accident victim. Their main mission is to restrain the body so as to prevent it from hitting the ground, generating forces and accelerations in the arrest process that are not harmful. A lack of empirical evidence and scant technical information provided by manufacturers regarding minimum clearance distance (MCD) below anchorage makes it necessary to study the safety distances required in the use of Energy Absorber Lanyards (EAL). This paper aims to determine the MCD below anchorage to arrest a fall using an EAL without hitting the ground. The real deformation of EAL when stopping a fall is studied. Ten EAL models distributed internationally by six manufacturers were chosen. Dynamic behavior tests were performed on the samples. Using image processing the total elongation of the equipment (elastic plus plastic) is obtained. The main conclusions are that maximum plastic elongation could be reduced by 29%. The method described in EN 355: 2002 underestimates elongation by up to 70% for some equipment 20% of EAL’s exceed the maximum arrest force (Fm) allowed in EN 355. The MCD data provided by manufacturers is not reliable. The data provided by manufacturers are incomplete. It is recommended that quality control for EAL’s be strengthened to ensure that products launched onto the market meet the requirement of EN355. The findings of this study recommended increasing MCD distance longer than that calculated according to EN355, at less than 1 m.
Highlights
The deformation energy was absorbed with variable force during the arrest process. It was composed of one part of plastic energy generated during the plastic elongation of the Energy Absorber Lanyards (EAL), which was normally the greater part, and another smaller part of elastic energy generated during the elastic elongation of the EAL and which was recovered after discharge
After analyzing the results obtained, it can be concluded that most manufacturers are conservative and their EAL’s have oversized unstitching paths
One EAL becomes completely unstitched, the rest do not reach the limit of their absorption capacity
Summary
Accidents due to falls from height remain one of the main causes of serious and fatal accidents worldwide [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. Security Ministry data, in 2016, falls from height accounted for 42.3% of serious, and 25% of fatal accidents [3]. There is a persistent negative trend, as can be seen by studying accidents that occurred in the United States, where, between 1997 and 2012, accidents due to falls from height rose from 36% in the study by Huang [8], to up to approximately 45% in [9]. Society is being faced with the need to reverse this trend by providing knowledge of techniques that prevent these accidents and by means of a detailed study of available protection elements [10,11]
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