On Improving The Safety Of Operators Of Vehicles Used In Agriculture

Abstract

The agro-industrial complex of the Russian Federation regularly is in the top three most traumatic industries. The analysis of industrial injuries shows that in the conditions of agricultural production, there is a tendency to an increase in the share of injuries associated with a number of design flaws in agricultural machinery, maintenance and repair facilities, including dump trucks, and in recent years there has been a steady increase in the share of dump rolling stock in agriculture.

The problem of injury hazard of transport dumping equipment used in agricultural production is the spontaneous (emergency) lowering (falling) of the loading platforms of the dump trucks, dump trailers, in particular, due to the failures and malfunctions of hydraulic lifting mechanisms. At present, more than 70% of the received serious and fatal injuries in one way or another are associated with machinery, herewith first of all operators (drivers, tractor drivers, machine operators) of transport and mobile energy facilities are injured.

The authors see a solution to the operator safety problem by technical methods, that is, to increase the safety of operators of transport and mobile energy vehicles is possible by improving a hydraulic drive with the help of the redundant safety and interlocking systems, the operation of which does not depend on the operability of the hydraulic drive and does not require outside operator intervention.

The article proposes technical safety devices for a body of a dump truck, a loading platform of a dump trailer equipped with a hydraulic tipping device. The devices will allow blocking the dump truck body, the loading platform in a raised position when the hydraulic drive is depressurized, that gives an opportunity to the operator to avoid injury when he is working in the dangerous zone under the body or loading platform of the trailer.

The use of interlocking and safety technical devices developed by the authors allows reducing the injury rates in agricultural production, to increase the reliability and safety of transport and mobile energy equipment used in agriculture.

The experiment researches have shown that the probability of operators’ protection by the developed technical devices is 0.98.