Ergonomic Equip

Reducing injuries in the work place and providing a comfortable work environment has become an important aspect of today's industrial engineers. Ergonomic improvements can be as simple as ordering a catalog scissor lift, tilt table, or work positioner, or as complex as ordering equipment custom designed for your work cell. If it is as straight-forward as specifying a model, or a load-raised height-lowered height-voltage-and duty cycle - don't pay distributor mark-up - contact NovaMek. Our buying power insures that your price will be very competitive.

More complex ergonomic improvements might take the form of the above picture. Here, product was off-loaded from a conveyor onto plywood slave pallets. The customer wanted a scissor lift with a turntable to allow the operator to stand in one place and load the slave pallets at an ergonomic work height. As layers were added, the lift table was lowered. When all layers were complete, the finished pallet was pushed to a length of take-away conveyor for fork lift removal. Problems encountered were that retaining stops needed to be fabricated on the roller conveyor attached to the turntable, to keep the load in place as it was rotated, yet one end of the conveyor needed to be opened to allow the load to be rolled onto the take-away conveyor. Pneumatics were not available to actuate a pop-up stop. In addition, many of the slave pallets were warped, making transfer difficult, and creating ergonomic problems. NovaMek's solution was to fabricate a gate with interim rollers that rotated 90 degrees between the full up (stop position) and down (transfer position). Instead of air actuation, a caliper and pin-stop was developed to lock the gate and allow manual actuation. With the gate up, the load was trapped on the turntable, and allowed clearance between the take-away conveyor for the corners to spin through. With the gate down, the rollers provided a bridge to allow warped pallets to travel without hanging up.

Other types of engineered ergonomic products are lift assists. Commonly called "balancers" or "manipulators", these are devices that reduce the load imposed on your labor force by providing a mechanism to bear the load. The operator then has to provide only the force necessary to overcome inertia. Balancers, show in the top two photos to the left, are similar to a chain or wire rope hoist. They can be configured with a circuit that raises or lowers the load based on a slight directional force provided by the operator, or this can be accomplished via metering valves. Balancers can be furnished with end effectors that hook and trap the load, grip the load, vacuum or magnetically attach to the load, and rotate the load. Balancers typically mount on jib or bridge cranes to provide an underhook coverage to fit the work cell.

Manipulators rigidly couple the load to the jib or bridge crane. The pedestal mount manipulator at the left mounts the gripper/rotate to a rigid mast mounted to an articulating arm that rotates 360 degrees. Cell coverage is the diameter - 2x the manipulator arm length. The vertical lift cylinder mounts the end effector to a long-stroke pneumatic cylinder attached to a carriage moving in an X-Y manner in a bridge crane, to give complete cell coverage. The quad rod cylinder shown is similar to the vertical lift cylinder, with the exception that it uses 4 rods to provide the rigidity. In this case, the end effector is a series of vacuum cups designed to pick up and rotate a number of different products that are produced in batches, without a tool changeover.