Manufacturing facilities, particularly those that have production platforms with mixers for ingredients, commonly need to use every bit of available space for the various applications performed in the facility. Employees frequently work in these applications, so safety devices are a necessity, especially when the employees are working from height.
 
Chemical and food production factories are frequently packed with production platforms. Many of these plants have large reactors or grinders with hoppers accessed by elevated platforms positioned near the top of the vessels. Commonly a lift truck loads pallets of ingredients onto these upper levels for employees to load into these mixers. Employees, commonly positioned near a ledge, must remove heavy bags from the pallet, slice them open and pour them into the large mixer.
 
The mixer is often located near the pallet drop area to minimize the distance the employee has to travel with the heavy bag. A series of catwalks and small mezzanines around the mixer and the production machinery often complete the area. This small space leaves very little room for employee, product, and proper fall protection guarding, which can expose employees to a high risk for incidents like falls.
 
While this application is fairly common, every single manufacturing facility has its own unique space constraints. In spite of the constraints, all pallet drop areas on elevated platforms should be properly shielded for fall protection, but areas on production platforms where employees are asked to work around the ledge, often in a hostile environment, must be taken seriously. This can be tiring, repetitive work in a dusty or wet environment so companies must take safety out of employee’s hands, and give them one less thing to think about during the day.
 
The result of the nature of applications that are typical of chemical or food manufacturing, acquiring the areas on which employees work can be challenging. Which might be why fall protection safety is usually left to a piece of chain, which is not enough to keep employees safe or meet OSHA codes and ANSI standards. This isn't a type of situation where you can ignore protection and at the same time, most standard solutions will not be the right fit, may pose hazards.
 
These are four examples of applications in chemical and food manufacturing in which custom solutions are most often necessary to make certain employees have adequate fall protection.
 
No Room on the Platform
 
Considering the complexity of the the applications in the areas that needed to be protected in most processing facilities, there's often little room on the platform to accommodate a safety barrier. In these instances, custom-designed safety gates are needed as they often need to be worked into the existing framework of the platform. Like for example, a custom designed safety gate may affix to the handrail instead of the walkway floor to provide dual-gate protection while taking up a minimum amount of space.
 
Rotating Pallets
 
When a pallet drop area includes a turntable that rotates 360 degrees, there are usually alternative challenges that make custom safety solutions a necessary choice. There can be barriers such as low overhead, the traffic patterns of lift trucks and how the trucks enter the platform, or there may be infractions from a ramp or mixer that impact how a safety gate could be used. Custom safety gate designs should support the pallets and drop area requirements; they need to also ensure that the applications and processes are not impacted while providing a safe work environment.
 
Blending Hoppers
 
Blending hoppers are commonly positioned near to a ledge so the employee can simply pick up the sack from the pallet, turn and dump the bag of ingredients into the hopper without carrying the bag. In such cases, there's usually restricted depth which fails to provide enough room for a traditional dual-gate safety system. Safety gate systems that use gates that have back-side gates that raise up and out of the way to allow access to the pallet while the ledge gate is closed are needed here. With this type of custom system in place, an employee can pick up the bag around the pallet and put it freely into the hopper while a barrier is in place at the ledge to prevent a fall.
 
Overhead Hoists and Vacuums
 
Many processing plants use overhead hoists to load and unload materials. In some operations, overhead hoists lift materials up to an elevated work platform in the place of using a lift truck. It's the traditional method of lifting super sacks up to the processing platform where they may be thrown into hoppers. Other facilities can use a lift truck to elevate the material up to the platform, but then will use an overhead hoist to access the material once they are ready to work with the material. This is a popular method of draining drums of ingredients off of a pallet. Custom safety gates with no overhead components that would integrate with the overhead equipment are needed in this case. The custom solutions can offer interconnected gates that close on one side while opening the other, preventing employee falls.
 
This article is originally posted on tronserve.com