Affiliation:
1. Roma Tre University, Department of Engineering
Abstract
It is recognized that increased mechanization in mining has resulted in a larger number of workers exposed to longer durations of whole-body vibration (WBV) in mining work context. This physical agent is one of the leading causes for workplace disability and it is regarding of many mining operators that during daily activities use mining vehicles such as dozers, haul trucks, Load Haul Dump (LHD) vehicles and wheeled shovel. The present study was conducted in a typical mining context in order to investigate the effect of the WBV driver�s exposure on different vehicles and determine whether differences that exist in WBV exposures between different model trucks. The measurements WBV exposures were calculated per ISO 2631-1 (1997) by a tri-axial accelerometer fixed on the driver�s seat. The vehicles investigated are different and they carry out the same activities within the mining process. To further evaluate another important parameter, the effects of the vehicle wearing, the acceleration data were obtained on the same truck model of a precedent measurement campaign realized few years ago. The results point out that highest acceleration values were on the z-axis (vertical), the values respect the limits defined by the italian law and the data obtained in the previous campaign result comparable with the values obtained in this work.