The Price of Safety
As of today, the leading cause of fatalities and injuries in the construction industry is due to a falling-related incident. Data from the United States Department of Labor and published by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) found that 2017 falling incidents alone contributed to 39.2% of the total construction tragedies. But how do these incidents happen? Much of the conventionally used construction equipment is designed to safely extend a worker as far as possible to allow them to operate in challenging-to-reach places that current automated processes cannot do. These working platforms are called Mobile Elevated Work Platforms (MEWPs). Although effective by design for accomplishing work, these machines, when misused, can become dangerous. Below are a few examples of commonly used equipment with a much higher risk of injury.
The leading cause of injuries while using these machines is the high probability of the machine toppling over if the center of mass shifts too quickly or far in one direction, injuring personnel or damaging valuable job site materials and progress. When moving heavy loads, this same risk also affects construction vehicles like dump trucks, cranes, excavators, and bulldozers. The danger of using MEWPs and construction vehicles creates a strong demand for a device that can inexpensively measure angle changes to accurately determine a body’s center of mass and mitigate workplace injuries.
The goal of every construction site should be to create a work environment that protects workers from unsafe working conditions. With today’s technology, many safety features can easily be implemented into an existing working system to decrease accidents. Technologies like the Inertial Labs Kernel Tilt Sensor create an affordable workplace safety solution.
Applications of Tilt Sensors
Regardless of how the job site uses workplace vehicles, all are pre-rated for specific weight limits. Continuous usage or improper loading of vehicles creates a need for a device to measure if the vehicle is overloaded. By placing a Kernel DTS on major structural components, the device can easily be integrated into a system that alerts the user if the vehicle’s structural integrity is at risk, even if it operates within the pre-rated weight limit requirements. This adds a second layer of safety and peace of mind to workers and management. The image below shows how two Kernel DTSs could use relative orientation angles to detect a yielding structural component on an excavator. The user could be alerted to the danger if the angle difference exceeds a set limit.
When using MEWPs (Aerial Work Platforms (AWPs) or Elevating Work Platforms (EWPs), external factors outside of weight limits can cause swaying while a worker is in the air. Excessive movement on the platform, high winds, or uneven terrain can prove fatal when using such vehicles. Using a DTS to detect unsafe platform swaying would drastically decrease the number of injuries in a construction site from falling. A device could even be used as a part of a system that could automatically retract a MEWP if operating conditions were monitored as being outside of safe operating conditions.
Benefits of the Digital Tilt Sensor
The Inertial Labs Digital Tilt Sensor (DTS), has many benefits when integrated into a system. Due to its compact size, the device is easily mountable on or inside a carrier. Its performance in a dynamic environment separates the Inertial Labs DTS from other tilt sensors. Many tilt sensors on the market have satisfactory performance in a static setting. Still, the device can no longer accurately measure pitch and roll when the carrier object moves in the horizontal frame.
This is because accelerometers can only measure relative to Earth’s gravitational pull. A dynamic platform rotating or translating at a constant velocity could never capture motion by accelerometers alone. Integrating the acceleration value to get orientation while moving would provide an error too large to be usable. This is why the DTS uses gyroscopes to calculate orientation, which is then corrected by the accelerometers to mitigate drift. The graphic below shows how to get more accurate angular rates and relative orientations.
The Inertial Labs DTS is explicitly designed to be used in an environment that may be exposed to high shock and vibration, which makes it perfect for use on the construction site. For rugged environments, two models allow users to choose from an IP65-rated or IP67-rated device. After an in-house calibration, the device is shipped pre-configured to measure Pitch, Roll, Acceleration (in all 3-axes), and Angular Rates with impressive accuracy. There is always a perfect solution for every application, and we promise to help you find it.
