Abstract
Tens of thousands of fall-from-height accidents take place at construction sites every year. These types of accidents range from minor to fatal, causing a significant financial burden to enterprises, personal and family traumatic experiences, high medical costs, as well as hard compensation claim settlements. It makes sense then, that some sort of effective personal protective equipment (PPE) be devised to stop these types of accidents from happening. This article aims to explain how PPE can be used to minimize personal injury and the costs implied. The main contribution of this study is that the prototypes made with dynamic ropes and terminals knotted—without an energy absorber—could safely retain falls. Results show that standards EN 354 and EN 364 need to incorporate dynamic test requirements, for the reason that a high loading rate significantly reduces the resistance in static tests that manufacturing companies claim they have. Surprisingly, more than 90 percent of work at heights use PPE without any absorber. Finally, this study calls for the need to accurately determine the dynamic response of PPE in order to further advance in improvements of these fall arrest systems with no energy absorber.
Highlights
Falls from a height are the main causes of serious and fatal workplace accidents in almost every country
This study aims to determine what a lanyard of a low stretch kernmantle and dynamic ropes needs to absorb the required energy to arrest a fall safely
It is a fact that lanyards by themselves do not arrest falls from a height, but in conjunction with
Summary
Falls from a height are the main causes of serious and fatal workplace accidents in almost every country. Taking the construction sector in the USA as a reference, accidents due to falls from heights are the cause of the greatest number of deaths for the years 1990 and 2001. These accidents seem to correlate with the number of workers in the sector [3]. This trend persisted in the period between 1997 and 2012, where accidents due to falls from heights went from 36.3 percent in the Huang study [3] to 44.6 [4]
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